Notes on the Aqua Port

Both the Aqua and X11 version of Tk are shipped on Mac OS X. The presence of the DISPLAY environment variable determines at runtime which version of Tk to use.

The GUIs on Aqua look the same as on X11. However, a minimal menubar is provided because on Aqua there is always a menubar.

ABOUT BUTTONS

Buttons can’t have colors in Aqua. Thus, citool’s prompt lose their colors.

Buttons can’t have multiple lines of text in Aqua. This might be a Tk bug or a restriction of the Aqua widgets. Using Interface Builder I couldn’t create a multiline push button. The vertical size is fixed. However, I could create a multiline rounded button. I suspect Tk is using the latter because the buttons appear taller when they are multi-line, but only the first line of text shows up. While this is sorted out, we should only put a single line of text in buttons.

ABOUT TEAR-OFF MENUS

Tear-off menus were removed in Aqua where possible and disabled where not.

We can’t just remove all tear-off menus using the options database because difftool has logic that depends on the indices of the menu items starting at 1 (the tearoff takes the zeroth position). In the particular case of difftool, we just disable the tear-off to keep the indices the same.

Windows and Unix still have tear-offs.

NOTES

  • There is a bad interaction with what Mac OS X defines as "an application" and the way we exec bk to launch other GUIs. For example, running citool and getting a message (via exec bk msgtool) results in launching a new with shell which blocks the old wish shell (the old wish shell appears to be hosed because it’s not responding to GUI events) until the user dismisses msgtool. Combine that with the fact that new apps sometimes appear under the currently selected app and you get very confused users.

    Also, exec'ing on Mac OS is not as fast as it is on Linux.

  • Automatic regressions (src/t/g.*) do not work on Aqua. The problem has to do with event generation in Tk/Aqua, and it was decided not to delay the Aqua port.