TCL Developer Studio

Table of Contents

What is it?

TCL Developer Studio (TCLDev for short) - is developer environment for tcl developing. It is written by using TCL/TK language and Tix library. It is tested under Windows and Linux/PC and should work under any platform, which has TCL/TK and Tix. It is tested with TCL/TK 8.0.4.
Now, TCLDev has very user-friendly interface, a rich editor with many useful features, file tree for easy navigation and output window, which is used for show output information.

How to get it?

See TCL Developer studio page: http://www.star.spb.ru/~small/tcldev

License

The TCLDev is released under GPL license. For more information see: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Known bugs

The debug window does not work under Windows.
Menu shortcuts does not always work under Windows.
The debug window does not works under Linux with TCL/TK 8.0.3 and less.

Are You found bug?

Please, report me: mailto:small@star.spb.ru

Short user guide

TCLDev has optional argument - file name. If file name specified, TCLDev opens this file on running.
TCLDev has a main menu, toolbar and other windows. If you set mouse pointer to button in toolbar and wiat - you will see balloon help. Also, toolbar has a find combo-box. You can simple insert any text and press enter and TCLDev will search this string in current file. Also it hase search history.
There are status bar at the bottom  the TCLDev window. It contains help string,  time field, and cursor position. You can click on line number for first call Go to dialog

Windows

The work windows separated to three part: File Tree Window, Output window, Editor Window. You can change size of these windows easy.

File tree window

File tree window showes tree. This tree contain file nodes. There are different icons for text file, tcl file and project file nodes. Each file node contains a procedures. You can easy go to any procedure by selecting it in the tree. TCLDev automatically updates this tree, but sometimes it may be outdated. Just right-click on tree and say "Refresh" for updating it.

Output window

THe purpose of this window is showing output information. It contain two pages: debug and find. There you run your program TCLDev redirect stdout and stderr to it debug page. Then you use Find In Files feature, TCLDev showes all founded string in Find page. You can go to any of founded line by clicking on it.

Editor window

In the editor window you edit your programs. This window has very useful features like: You can disable and configure these features by options dialog.
Also TCLDev has a set of advanced editor features, which can be selected from Edit|Advanced menu:

Find and other

TCLDev has three find dialogs: Find dialog, Replace dialog and Find in Files dialog. From find dialog you can find any string or regular expression in the current file. You can repeat last search by Find Next function. From replace dialog you can replace any string or regular expression by another string. You can replace one occurence or all in the current file. Find in files dialog searchs string in multiple files and output result to the find page in the output window

Go to ...

BY using go to dialog you can go to the selected file or procedure in the file very fast. This dialog runs from Edit|Go to menu or by clicking line number in the status bar.

Project Management

In the TCLDev implemented very simple project management.

All project settings are stored in the project file. You can create new project from "New" dialog by selecting "Project" icon or from Project|New menu.

The TCLDev project file is an ordinary tcl file. All project settings are stored in the comments. Then you load this file, TCLDev asks you to load it as project file. If you say "no", TCLDev loads it as ordinary tcl file. But if you say "yes", it reads all project settings from file, loads it and delete all project settings from file. So, you will not see it in editor.

All project settings may be specific for concrete OS, or may be common. TCLDev see OS specific value, and if it is not specified, it sees common value. So, you can specify different paths, commands and others project settings for different OS. Now, only settings for windows and unix are specified.

The projects settings are:

If you do not  specify run or debug, these buttons and menu items will greyed. You should specify these options for activate them.
Then you close project TCLDev ask you to save it.

Options

In options dialog user can edit different  TCLDev options. It has four pages: Common, Editor, Font and Print.
On the Common page you can edit Tix Options: select color and font scheme. I am highly recommend restart TCLDev after it.
On editor page you can edit a set of editors options: If you use slow machine for editing a big file TCLDev may be unusable. In this case try to disable sintax highlighting and sintax indent.
On font page you can specify size and code page of editor font. In future there will complete font selector.
On the Print page you may change some print options, like default printer name, line numbering and pretty printing.
All options are stored in options file (~/.tcldevrc in Unix or tcldev.cfg in Windows). Also TCLDev remember dialogs positions, information about files and some other information. You can delete this file for deleting all these information.

Keyboard bindings

Here is a list of used keyboard bindings, used in TCLDev:
Ctrl-Insert or Ctrl-c for copying selection to the clipboard
Ctrl-Delete or Ctrl-x for cutting selection to the clipboard
Shift-Insert or Ctrl-v for inserting text from clipboard
Ctrl-a for selecting all text in the current file
Ctrl-n for create new file
Ctrl-o for onep existing file
Ctrl-s for saving current file
Ctrl-f for calling "Find" dialog
Ctrl-l for repeating search
Ctrl-h for calling "Replace" dialog
Ctrl-g for calling go to dialog
Ctrl-z undo
Ctrl-y redo
Ctrl-p for printing current file
Ctrl-Shift-f format selection
Ctrl-Shift-c comment selection
Ctrl-Shift-i indent selection
Ctrl-Shift-u unindent Selection