Really enjoy the language, even if I don't use it much these days. Does it still produce GUIs from 1995 on Linux? I'd still be using it today if it had halfway reasonable support for building GUIs on Linux, like they've had for ages on other platforms.
A theming engine went in something like 15 years ago now; the default theme looks rather dated, but there are plenty of others. See https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/List+of+ttk+Themes (though the screenshots of core themes are from 8.5/8.6 - default in particular has changed a bit in Tk 9).
The "catch" is that the theming engine has its own new widgets, and so to be themed an application has to use the new API. Code from 1995 (or 2005) still produces GUIs from 1995.
Yeah, they added that a long time ago, but it's not at all the same as built-in support. My experience was trying out fragile third-party projects with little or no documentation. The whole point of using Tcl/Tk for writing a GUI was the convenience.
Things may have changed over time. I no longer pay attention. Maybe I'll give it another try.
The theming engine is absolutely "built-in", as are a handful of themes; in particular aqua and the winnative/xpnative/vistanative family (which integrate with the Mac/Windows windowing system such that the application will look "native" by default on those systems).
> which integrate with the Mac/Windows windowing system such that the application will look "native" by default on those systems
That's my point. You can make an app that looks okay on those OSes, but all of the built-in options for Linux look ridiculous, and then you're back to the third-party stuff.
I don't think clam looks "ridiculous", but I suppose we're in to subjective stuff now. :)
In principle this isn't really any different from GTK or Qt theming (where it's up to users to go forth and find themes they like, and set the default as desired), but in those cases you tend to get themes packaged up by distributions and GUI configuration support from desktop environments, and neither seems likely to happen for Tk.
Reminds me of using Tkinter with Python, while learning Python. There are other GUIs available, but finding examples of working code with a newer GUI is going to be more troublesome (but not impossible). I think it's just that the documentation has been centered around Tk(inter) for so long, most people just choose it as a default. I know Python has gotten better about GUI support (probably from the popularity in machine learning/AI usage), but with Tcl being less popular, you need to do some due diligence to find up to date documentation on modern GUI usage.
