Re: How do lispers do their GUI programming anyway? (was Re: Curses alternative for Lisp?)

Peter Hildebrandt wrote:


a modern standard look and feel (in particular I do not enjoy the
hard edged appearance of tk on linux (I know that one can use skins
for tk, but I don't want my users to have to deal with this)


Tk 8.5.0 is a large improvement in looks on linux.
All themed (ttk, formerly "tile") widgets and the updated tk widgets
now use antialiased fonts - which makes everything look better.

"Out of box", it comes with 4 themes for themed (Ttk) widgets and
updated+improved (but not actually themed, just the old color scheme
variations) Tk widgets. The look closest to the old Tk linux look
isn't the updated Tk widgets, it's the Ttk "classic" theme - the only
good reason I can think of to use "classic" is to preserve L&F of some
embedded-market GUI control, it's as functional-but-ugly as ever.

As of the 8.5.0, Tk apps no longer look totally out of place on the
linux desktop, much like Qt and Gtk+ apps that may not look identical
but at least don't look like they crawled out of the late 1980s / early
1990s.

It still doesn't look "as native" on Linux as on Windows or MacOSX -
none of the included themes use Qt/KDE or Gtk+ themes. There is the
possibility of someone writing Ttk themes that could blend in better by
really wrapping Qt or Gtk+ themes (the latter like Java 6 now does),
and there is someone (Georgios Petasis) working on wrapping Qt.

One of the included themes, "clam", I wouldn't describe as "hard-edged",
though I would describe it as slightly too beige for my liking. (your
users wouldn't necessarily have to deal with themes, you could
just "Ttk::setTheme clam". Note that if you want the themed widgets,
you should use ttk::button instead of tk::button etc. Though
personally, I don't mind the updated unthemed tk look except maybe its
scrollbars)

Tcl/tk 8.5.0 is in Debian/unstable . Might have now changed, but
if you install 8.4 and 8.5 in parallel, 8.4 takes precedence by default,
so you should use update-alternatives to tell your Debian system to use
8.5







.

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