From: Harry Truax <htruax@...>
Date: 2006-03-10T00:47:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Looking for good reads on Ruby TK GUI programming

Karl,

I know what you mean. I have found several Perl/TK examples, but found it
Difficult in discovering the translation to Ruby/TK. I guess I will go and
Buy a good TK book on GUI programming and start there.

Harry

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl von Laudermann [mailto:doodpants@mailinator.com] 
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 10:39 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Looking for good reads on Ruby TK GUI programming

Harry Truax wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Could anyone suggest any good examples, articles, books, etc. for Ruby 
> TK GUI programming with particular emphasis on multi-screen/window GUI 
> applications?

No. And it's frustrating. The only Ruby/Tk tutorials I've been able to find,
including the Ruby/Tk chapter of the Pickaxe, just provide a few simple
examples, then tell you to go find some other Tk API documentation and
translate it in your head into Ruby/Tk. It took me maybe two hours of
Googling just to figure out how to programmatically select some text in a
TkText widget. (The answer is that TkText has a concept called "tags", and
you can apply any arbitrary tag to any range of text in the widget, and to
select some text you apply a predefined tag called "sel" to the desired
range using the tag_add() method.
Because a set_selection() method would have been too straightforward and
useful.)

It would be really nice if someone would write a definitive book on
developing GUI apps with Ruby/Tk. What I'm envisioning is a complete guide
on how to develop GUI apps using Tk, covering all necessary concepts such as
how to use most widgets (buttons, checkboxes, text controls, menus, etc.),
how to do modal and non-modal dialogs, how to manage multiple windows, event
handling, key shortcuts, etc. And it would use Ruby and Ruby/Tk exclusively
as the language and API for its code samples. And of course include a
complete Ruby/Tk API reference as it's second half.

And if, say, the Pragmatic Programmers were to write such a book, that would
rock.