[R-gui] tcltk MDI

[James Wettenhall]

Hi Peng,

My understanding is that MDI is very difficult (or perhaps
impossible) in Tcl/Tk.

Here are some MDI Tcl/Tk ideas in a Wiki entry:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/2163

(I just found them by Googling Tcl/Tk MDI)

Another thing Tcl/Tk is lacking is true modal dialogs.  It can
simulate them with grab, but unfortunately, it is still
possible for them to occasionally become hidden behind other
windows.

Is platform independence important to you?  If you only need
your software to run on Windows, perhaps one option is to use
GraphApp (the GUI toolkit used to build the main Rgui windows).
See the windlgs example in:
rw1091\src\library\windlgs\
Or you could even use Microsoft Visual C++ / Visual Basic
and R DCOM.

These limitations in Tcl/Tk are two of the main reasons why I
have started looking at wxPython as an alternative to Tcl/Tk.
Right now, I can't seem to access the wxPython and wxWidgets
websites, but you should be able to find some screenshots
there, including MDI:
http://www.wxPython.org/screenshots.php

A good way of getting an overview of what Tcl/Tk has to offer,
is to run the ActiveTcl demos.  I don't think there's any MDI
there.  But Tcl/Tk does at least have tabbed notebooks.

I have started building an R interface to wxPython:
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/folders/james/wxPython/
(which works reasonably well on Windows)

but I still haven't really had time to try MDI, as I'm still
spending a lot of time maintaining and supporting my existing
R-Tcl/Tk GUI applications, and I have found that porting
R-wxPython from Windows to Linux is non-trivial for several
reasons.  One reason is that unlike Windows, Red Hat Linux's
Python RPM doesn't include a shared library (libpython2.2.so) !

Best regards,
James