Tclkick

Tclkick is a modified version of TclKit that contains a few enhancements. Besides the functionality provided by this enhancements, it works like the official Tclkit. This means, that it is very likely that programs (starkits) that run with the official Tclkit do also run with Tclkick, but not necessarily all starkits developed with and for Tclkick also run with Tclkit.

A list of enhancements is below. In short, Tclkick is Threads-enabled and my “small” enhancements to Itcl are included. Binary builts of Tclkick are offered for Linux and Windows here.

One thing is to be said: Tclkick works for me. I don’t give any guarantee that they work for you as well. I also don’t take any responsibility for possible damages you do by using the packages provided here. Use them at your own risk!

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Tclkick vs. Tclkit
There are a few differences between the official Tclkits from http://www.equi4.com/tclkit.html and Tclkick.

1. Full Threads support is enabled
2. Threads enabled Itcl is built in the kits, including the patch for cget code
3. Enhancement of genkit.tcl to support MinGW on windows
4. The 8.5 builds (except 8.5a4) contain the implementations for TIP 280 and TIP 290

The genkit.tcl scripts are not longer provided for download here. They can be checked out from svn as well as the complete Tclkick source tree. There are three scripts, one for Linux, one that works like Tclkit for Windows and one that runs from within a cmd on Windows, like Tclkitsh.
The easy way for Linux and Windows users is to download the ready-to-go Tclkicks from sourceforge. They are provided on the download page for tloona.

To get Tk on linux or tclkicksh for windows, do package re Tk. The same applies to Itcl: package re Itcl. To load Thread, do load {} Thread.

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Build instructions
The complete source tree for Tclkick is available via the Tloona subversion repository at sourceforge. Have a look at the Tloona project site there as well. To check it out, get a subversion client. The svn command line client is included in many linux distributions. For windows, I recommend TortoiseSVN, which can be found at http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/. It is a plugin for windows explorer and enhances the explorer with svn support on right-click.
To build Tclkick on Windows, you need MinGW and msys installed, a unix like build environment for windows. It includes the gcc compiler suite and a lot of tools used in unix build environments, e.g. make, sh, autotools etc. The outcoming binaries are fully windows compatible. Graphical installers are availabe from the download page at http://www.mingw.org/, look out for “MinGW”, “Msys” and “MsysDTK”
On windows and linux, you need a tclsh installed. Linux distributions mostly have a preinstalled tclsh (check with which tclsh), which is enough to build the Tclkits. For windows, there are two possibilities: either download ActiveTcl from http://www.activestate.com/ or build a Tclsh by yourself – directly from the Tclkick source tree you’ve checked out from here previously. To do this, cd to the src/tcl/win subdirectory inside a MinGW shell and run ./configure, make install. The tclsh will be installed in /usr/local/, which is essentially the local/ subdirectory in the msys base directory. Once it is installed, it is accessible from MinGW shells automatically. To have it in cmd command windows as well, you need to add the local/bin directory to your %PATH% environment variable (Control Panel -> System -> Advanced). After that, you need to make distclean in the tcl/win directory, otherwise the Tclkit won’t build.
When you have everything together, the rest is simple. Cd to the top Tclkick directory and do tclsh genkit-*.tcl to built everything. This compiles the Tclkick, renames it to tclkick(sh)8x(.exe) and deletes the build output folders (leaves everything as it was before). The build process does not require interaction, you can get yourself a cup of coffee in between ;-) (except on Mac or other platforms wher I have not tested it…) If something fails, there is an output file in output/your-hostname where you can read what went wrong.The extensions Itcl and Itk are also in the src directory. Itk is not included in the Tclkit build, while Itcl is. Both are the actual source versions of my modified extensions.