Other Widget Sets

This book describes the set of widgets provided by core Tk distribution. There are number of other widget sets for Tk. Some are implemented as Tcl procedures that compose the basic widgets into useful combinations (e.g., BWidgets). Others are C-based toolkits (e.g., Tix and BLT). A few of the more popular widget sets are listed here:

BLT

George Howlett created BLT. It includes a great graph widget that efficiently supports large datasets. It also includes a tabbed notebook and tree view widget. Its busy widget covers your application with a transparent widget that just displays a watch cursor, which is handy when the application is busy doing something and you don't want to accept mouse clicks. This is a C-based toolkit.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/blt/

Tix

Tix was created by Ioi Lam, and is now supported by a team of volunteers. It includes several widgets and an infrastructure for creating new widgets in Tcl. Notable features include balloon help, tabbed windows, paned window, and a hierarchy browser. This is a C-based toolkit, although it includes a number of compound widgets created in Tcl.

http://tix.sourceforge.net/

[incr Tk] and [incr Widgets]

[incr Tk] is a C-based framework for creating compound widgets using the [incr Tcl] object system. [incr Widgets] is the widget set created using that framework. It includes loads of widgets, from simple labeled-entry widgets up through HTML display widgets. These tools are described in Chad Smith's book, [incr Tcl] from the Ground Up (Osborne-McGraw Hill, 1999).

http://incrtcl.sourceforge.net

BWidgets

BWidgets is a set of Tcl-based widgets. It includes a variety of compound widgets, including a tabbed notebook, combobox, and hierarchy browser. It is hosted at the Standard Tcl Lib (tcllib) web site:

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/tcllib

TkTable

TkTable is combination of a gridding geometry manager and several text-oriented widgets. It makes it easy to lay out tabular data like spreadsheets, and it also provides a large amount of control over the formatting of cells and their data.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/tktable