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Comment by trebligdivad | Hacker News Reader

Tcl/Tk has got to be the easiest GUI system out there; you can get simple stuff going with no effort - nothing I've seen comes close to that simplicity.

Good to see it's getting some modern support.

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The current main project for Tk, targeting the 9.2 release next year, is porting to work on Wayland. (But not dropping support for X11, Windows or macOS.) Apparently, the widget demo is now working (i.e., you could probably build some applications on it) but advanced features like accessibility support are still in progress.

Hey Donal, long time! Great to see you still involved.

Didn't expect Wayland support that soon!

It hits a sweet spot for a lot of basic UI needs.

Is it still true if I want to custom widget with animations?

I've done animations at the Tcl layer before with composition of Tk objects. for little visualizations its just fine, certainly not AAA

What about oldschool Visual Basic?

It was nice/workable for its time, and one wishes that there was some modern alternative, but "RAD" seems to have dropped off the radar.

Some things I've tried/looked into (beyond TCL/TK):

- Gambas --- Linux only, not sure if there's a nice visual UI builder

- LiveCode --- still salty about the license rug pull, wish the openxtalk folks could get some traction

- MoonBasic --- looks promising, but currently trying....

- flet.dev --- the AI-integration in this makes it quite compelling, though I wish that there was an integrated UI drawing tool, https://github.com/raffieeey/Flet-Visual-Builder is self-described as buggy and hasn't seen an update in 7 months

- Lazarus --- still bummed I never got anywhere with Delphi --- if flet.dev doesn't work out, may try it

Besides the sibling comment, VB.NET is still around, even if not with the attention it once had.

VB + C# with Windows Forms is not much different from old school VB.

And for the pixel positioning complaints, it is about time people learn about FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel, they exist since .NET 2.0 (2005).

That's new-school VB. Tcl was doing automatic widget layout back when VB was using absolute "dialog units" for everything.

To be more pedantic that was taken from Motif layout managers, and old school VB did have layout managers available, however a large majority only dragged and dropped from the toolbox.

Too much rat wrestling. You could bang out a few lines of Tcl in your editor and have a working GUI. Even stub out the commands that widgets run, tweak and reload until it behaves right, then add those back for a working program. Absolutely nice for providing a visual interface for your Unix scripts or programs, or for building whole applications in if you're daring.

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