Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 21 Aug 1995 07:38:15 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Peter da Silva <peter@bonkers.taronga.com>
To:        jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Any reason we can't enable the bus mouse by default?
Message-ID:  <199508211238.HAA11059@bonkers.taronga.com>
In-Reply-To: <7640.809007192@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Aug 21, 95 05:13:12 am

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Yes, I do understand that.  The problem is, I don't *want* to run ctk
> on X!

But I do. So do a lot of people. I have a friend who wrote his own front
end for Tk and curses that's switching over to ctk because it frees him
from having to maintain an extra component of his package. And if you
write the code with ctk in mind you get a reasonable UI both ways.

> I don't want to run anything with such a convoluted API
> regardless of how many underlying imaging models it supports.  It's
> just Too Evil(tm).

You obviously have experience with a lot more APIs than I, but I don't
see the Tk API being that convoluted compared with others that people
are apparently entirely happy to use. It's simpler than any other X-based
API I've ever used, for example.

And it's become a very popular one. It's got momentum, and it's about
time we grabbed onto stuff with momentum while we have a chance.

For simple displays (and you don't want to use anything but simple screens
with a curses interface: you don't have enough bits) Tk is not that hairy.

> I hate to propose Yet Another Standard for TCL, but it's not like
> Ousterhout ever started Tk with the intention of running it anywhere
> but under X.  Maybe now that he's at Sun he'll focus on evolving
> something more cross-platform in scope and approach, but I suspect
> that if he does, it won't look a lot like Tk.

SCO started out with the intent of providing something that was suited
for both curses and X and, you know what, it ended up looking a lot like
Tk. I suspect that ctk is going to be the best thing we're going to get
for a long time.



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199508211238.HAA11059>