AndroWish – run desktop Tcl/Tk programs almost unaltered on the Android Platform | Hacker News Reader

AndroWish – run desktop Tcl/Tk programs almost unaltered on the Android Platform

androwish.org

68 pointsjakobdabo22 comments

Does anyone know how and/or who is behind Tk? It is in my opinion the best open-source cross-platform gui toolkit, but it seems like both of these are true:

1. Hardly anybody uses it

2. It keeps getting steady updates and improvements

So what am I missing?

In addition to the Core Team, D. Richard Hipp ( sqlite3, fossil-scm ) is a pretty avid user, contributes to tcl and writes apps that use TCL (wapp is one, sqlite3 has easy hooks to TCL).

TCL isn't widely popular but has a strong core team and just enough interest to drive development.

It may be just my bubble, but I see TCL still being used, but I don't remember the last time I saw someone use a Tk application that wasn't written by me (and it's been a while since I wrote any Tk for that matter).

Well, I still use tkcon and tkdesk quite a bit, so I wouldn't comment on the popularity. I am a bit biased and generally don't use fancy graphical stuff. But I do follow the Tcl/Tk lists and newsgroups and there are quite a few people doing Tk stuff based on the discussion there.

* Okay, I just mentioned fancy graphical stuff and newsgroups. I feel old. I need a nap.

Well, searching for a tkdesk screenshot, I found https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjou... which really takes me back...

I typically like to use cwm and instead of modifying it to bring up dmenu or the like, I use TkDesk.

Is the 2.0 release on sourceforge the definitive version of TkDesk still?

I use girl all the time, it has all the features I need (and something more).

There is a gifted group of developers at the core.

https://www.tcl.tk/community/coreteam/

Nevertheless, new development and functionalities are tracked as proposals in the TIP page, an example of how to maintain an open source project.

https://core.tcl-lang.org/tips/doc/trunk/index.md

Is there some reason they seem to studiously avoid screenshots of the apps?

I looked over the site and couldn't see anything, even in the PDFs of their presentations except for one which had a tiny image that looked awful and had rather 1980s style colouring.

I know the technical detail will be more interesting to those who buy in, but to get people to buy into just how wonderful the idea is you need a bit more than a text description of it!

There are a couple of screenshots at:

https://www.androwish.org/index.html/wiki?name=Example+Scrip...

What I see there does not look promising. The results all look like desktop applications running on a tablet -- not mobile applications. Many of the controls (like scrollbars, grid views, and drop-down menus) are likely to be unusable in a touch interface because they are far too small to interact with reliably.

Decent Espresso uses AndroWish for their software found here(scroll down for screenshots): https://decentespresso.com/downloads

A talk on it can also be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey30Cg1fM0Q

Original HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571113

Those screenshots on Androwish's site appear to all be using the base theme. Tk is completely themeable and is pretty easy to extend. There is a repo that is making a large collection of open source themes available for tk and tkinter found here: https://github.com/TkinterEP/ttkthemes.

Another nice theme is a port of KDEs breeze theme: https://github.com/MaxPerl/ttk-Breeze

This isn't AndroWish related, but RattleCAD is a nice looking desktop Tcl/Tk application: http://www.rattlecad.com/

What about Python/Tkinter?

Not sure about Tkinter for Android[0], but for Python for Android take a look on Kivy/Py4A.[1,2]

As for Py/Qt for Android there is QPython.[3]

But, sadly, there are NO good Android alternative to "PyS60" (Python for Symbian S60).[4]

[0] https://learning-python.com/using-tkinter-programs-on-androi...

[1] https://github.com/kivy/kivy

[2] https://github.com/kivymd/KivyMD

[3] https://github.com/qpython-android/qpython3

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyS60

What is recommended IDE for someone with fairly basic knowledge of TCL? I'm creating/editing some machine nc-code post-processors that use TCL. So far I have used VS-Code with tcl extension but I wonder if there are 'preferred' IDEs.

When I last got paid to program in tcl, the best thing going was probably the Alpha text editor on the Mac. Alpha is kind of like emacs written in tcl, with a nice mix of emacsisms and Mac user interface compliance.

https://alphacocoa.sourceforge.io/AlphaScreenshots.html

Today I'd take a hard look at Komodo from ActiveState also.

As far as I know activestate has a TCL IDE.

But I think like lisp, an IDE is a foreign concept in coding TCL.

TCL is a different beast, it cannot be represented with an EBNF, you can redefine anything including language keywords etc.

TCL is thus closer to a human language (much more expressive) so making an IDE to accomodate features of TCL could be harder than conventional languages.

"like lisp"?

The high quality free IDE (SLIME) is a big part of why I still use common lisp.

I wouldn’t call slime an IDE, lisp compiler isn’t even included in it. Slime is a wonderful editor mode. You still need to configure things to get it working.

With an IDE, I think of something like Xcode or VS.

I think anything that Integrates the tools used for your Development Environment is an IDE.

SLIME integrates a compiler, debugger, code browser, documentation, and editor. If it's not an IDE than nothing is (and there are no Java IDEs either then because they almost always use an external compiler and runtime).

The line between IDEs and editors get blurry every day :).

You’re right java IDEs sometimes don’t include java sdk in the base package.

I’ve recently been fiddling with ios development, when thinking of an IDE, I think of xcode, visual studio etc. Lots of defaults and magic.

Slime might very well be considered an IDE, an IDE for power users :) who likely have learned at least some emacs lisp to get it working.

FWIW, when I first started using SLIME, I used it just as a debugger and REPL. I wrote all of my lisp code in vim and used slime for debugging it. I knew zero elisp and zero emacs shortcuts; I used the menu interface for all but a few commands.

The first (and only for about 3 years) elisp I wrote was a command to open up the current file in vim, and reload it when vim exited. This let me browse & debug source with emacs while editing with vim.

SLIME offered so many features that this was an actually useful workflow, and I didn't switch to using emacs for editing as well until much later, when evil-mode came out.

side-note:

I had tried other vi-like modes prior to evil-mode coming out (e.g. viper), but they fell in an uncanny valley for me; just familiar enough that I would regularly muscle-memory some sequence that didn't work in viper.

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