[ltk-user] First use of ltk

[Greg Bennett]

Peter, again thanks for the information and advice, and belated thanks for
creating ltk. I find the idea of using a textfield inside ltk for 
interactions  with
the repl appealing; now I just have to read some more to figure out what 
that
means in practice :-) !

***
Without wishing to start/continue/renew any "my lisp/OS is better than 
yours" threads,
and without cluttering up the list with code from my attempts,
I remain puzzled that my experience with Allegro under Windows is so 
different.

I did succeed in using  (start-wish)  followed  by some of your 
examples, which left me
with a live repl .. until I wanted to get a response from eg. clicking 
on a button. Activating
(mainloop) got the response, but the repl froze. C-c C-c in slime, plus 
choosing option 1
did get me an repl back. Short of killing my example window, this was 
the only way I
could interrupt that mainloop.

What I still missed was the possibility, for example, of testing things by
(a) using your "More complex example" with a live repl as above, and
(b) from that repl writing something like (erase-line canvas-of-example 
(list ..))
     to see it disappear.

*nix graphics seem to grab control of my lisp repl in a way I am not 
accustomed to,
and for which I do not have a mental model (yet).

But, after dealing with some undergraduate examinations, it's on to 
trying to
obtain repl interactions via textfields and Tk events!

Cheers /Greg

Peter Herth wrote:
> Hi Greg,
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 2:03 AM, Greg Bennett <gwbennett at sentex.ca> wrote:
>   
>> Peter, thanks for the message; thanks also to Daniel Herring and Victor.
>> It turns out that I did not have tcl and tk installed. I now have them
>> and all is well in that at the shell (bash)
>> wish -> a blank window and a % prompt
>>
>> while inside SBCL
>> (ltktest) and (ltk::ltk-eyes) do their thing.
>> As does the first example from the documentation.
>> So thanks all, once more.
>>     
>
> Good that this was resolved so easily :)
>
>   
>> ;;;;
>> My lisp experience is with Franz's Allegro and their common graphics.
>> There I can open a window and keep the listener/repl alive.
>>  From the repl
>> (setf w make-a-window-syntax)
>> then allows me to do things like
>> (draw-to w some-graphic)
>> from that REPL.
>> This facility is important to the application I'm interested in porting;
>> I guess it
>> means that I must learn how to program with threads/processes to obtain
>> this behaviour.
>>     
>
>
> First of all - you can interactively call start-wish to start a wish session and
> then use all LTk-functions from the repl (you will get events handles only
> if you call process-events or mainloop). However this is only for testing and
> interactive development.
>
> If you want to have a lisp repl within a LTk program, I would not recommend
> threads. Amongst all other possible problems, the LTk functionality should be
> used only from one thread. But fortunately, this is not necessary if you want
> for example just integrate a lisp listener into a LTk program. The
> easiest solution
> would be, to use a textfield for the repl interaction and trigger the
> Lisp evaluation
> from the corresponding Tk events - no threads needed. ABLE implements a
> small Lisp IDE completely in LTk.
>
> Peter
>
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