Ruby/Tk Tutorial

This tutorial is aimed at people that want to use Tk as toolkit with Ruby. It does not really matter whether you are very proficient in Ruby or with toolkits. Examples may overwhelm the novice sometimes, but each line is explained. Step over it and come back in a later stage. The small differences in those lines provide a wealth of information for the more experienced programmer.

Note: This is a work in progress. Mail comments to Kero. Or edit directly on The wiki version (which will, at some point, make this version obsolete).

A few reasons to use Tk:

• Tk is supported in many places (though others are definitely catching up),
• Tk may look small or simple, but is very powerful. Of course it can do all basics, like any toolkit, but some things are done in a very simple way,
• Its canvas has some very nice features for selecting and manipulating objects (like lines and curves) on it. It can even dump its content in a PostScript file.
• Tk has a few prebuilt windows like a color chooser and dialog,
• Can use many Tk extensions from Ruby.

• In a certain environments, other toolkits will look better (Gtk in Gnome, Qt under KDE),
• You are addicted to an IDE and demand you can build your UI with mouseclicks (or may be that's actually a reason to look at the building blocks and read on :-)

Installation Problems

The Course