Exploring Expect

Chapter 19. Expect + Tk = Expectk

Tk provides commands to build user interfaces for the X Window System. With Tk, you can build graphic user interfaces (GUIs) entirely using Tcl and its extensions. In this chapter, I will cover how to use Expect with Tk. Some of the examples are particularly noteworthy. These include a GUI for setting passwords, a terminal emulator, and a mechanism to watch for patterns in character graphic applications.

Tk is one of the most popular Tcl extensions—and deservedly so. Tk provides a layer of abstraction that is quite high-level and yet still provides a lot of flexibility. It is possible to do things much more quickly in Tk than in other toolkits, and even better—it is likely that you will do things with Tk that you never would have even tried without it.^[66]

Unlike the Tcl chapter, I will give only a brief overview of Tk here—it is not the primary focus of this book and is only mentioned a few times in other chapters. Nonetheless, a little knowledge of Tk is necessary to understand the gist of this chapter. I will make up for the lack of a complete introduction by giving a little more information when I use some of the Tk commands for the first time. However, I will skip parts of Tk that are not immediately relevant. For more information, refer to the Tk reference material. For more information on X, refer to The X Window System Series from O’Reilly and Associates.

Experienced Tk programmers may skip the introductory material in the next section and ...