Re: Variable windows: BLT or ???

[Ian Roxborough <irox@redhat.com>]

On Tuesday, August 28, 2001, at 05:31 PM, Keith Seitz wrote:
> Any way, in order to completely remove tix from our repository, we need to
> have a solution for the variable windows. This is (and has been) the
> biggest stumbling block for us whacking tix. We need some sort of
> hierachial tree widget.
> 
> I see three options:
> 
> 1) Pull in and update the "tree" widget that Source Navigator uses

This is a widget with about 200 or 300 features (no quite but it 
seems that way).  I've fixed some of problems/flaws in this widget,
however this was mainly to make Source-Navigator look pretty.
Unless you are playing with trees and tables with over a 1000
items in them, then this widget isn't the best solution.

> 2) Pull in BLT and use its hiertree widget.

Could do...

> 3) Look for another alternative (including writing our own)

I would suggest looking at BWidgets:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12883&release_id=44317

A pretty lite weight Tcl only (as in no C code).
 
> Having been through the SN tree widget, my inclination is to go with #2
> right now, even though it will take some non-trivial effort (for me) to
> upgrade BLT to build on cygwin.

I tried to replace the treetable widget in SN with the BWidgets and
the BLT tree, neither of these where able to do the job out of the box,
but this is because of the overloaded nature of SN.

BWidget would be my favorite, although I would like to see BLT
in Insight (and Source-Navigator), but for other reasons.

> Anyone have any comments on BLT, SN's tree widget, other alternatives?

You could remove Tix and replace it with BWidget.  Then at some
point in the future introduce BLT.  I wouldn't be so quick to bring
in BLT just to provide one widget (I'm more interested in BLT
for the other widgets/features).

Some notes on BWidgets: Last release July 2001 and uses Tcl/Tk8.1.1
or higher.

Ian.