Combo boxes in Ruby-Tk

Ruby
1

I’m a newcomer to Ruby, though a seasoned campaigner in Perl, and I’m
finding my feet, so please be nice!

I’ve been playing around with the Tk extension. The section on Ruby Tk
in
the pickaxe book is sketchy to say the least. I do have a well-thumbed
copy of Learning Perl/Tk, so I know my way around the basics.

My question is: is there any way in Ruby Tk to implement combo boxes?
Neither BrowseEdit nor JComboBox seem to work.

Rosie

2

Rosalind M. wrote:

Rosie
I’m a little surprised that nobody managed to come up with an answer to
this.

Is Tk really a hopeless case with Ruby? If it is, what alternative GUI
manager would you suggest?

Rosie

3

Hi!

In Brent B. Welsh’s book “Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk” 4th
ed. the index redirects “combobox” to “spinbox” (new in Tcl/Tk
version 8.4 IIRC):

require ‘tk’

TkSpinbox.new do
from -2
to 2
pack
end

TkSpinbox.new do
from -2
to 2
increment 0.1
pack
end

TkSpinbox.new do
@states=[“Arizona”, “California”, “New Mexico”]
values @states
wrap 1
pack
end

TkButton.new do
text “Quit”
command “exit”
pack
end

Tk.mainloop

Hope, that helps.

Julian

Am 02.04.2007 um 10:55 schrieb Rosalind M.:

4

On Apr 2, 2007, at 6:03 AM, Julian Schnidder wrote:

end
values @states
Tk.mainloop

Hope, that helps.

Julian

That’s an interesting example, but are spin boxes really the same as
combo boxes? The OP may also want to look at Tk::Iwidgets::Combobox.
Here is a minimal example.

require 'tk' require 'tkextlib/iwidgets'

DEBUG = []
COLORS = %w[red green blue cyan yellow magenta black white]

begin
root = TkRoot.new {title ‘Ruby/Tk Combo Box’}
cbx = Tk::Iwidgets::Combobox.new(root) {
labeltext “Colors:”
pack :pady => 10
}
cbx.insert_entry(0, COLORS.first)
COLORS.each { |color| cbx.insert_list(‘end’, color) }
btn = TkButton.new do
text “Quit”
command { Tk.root.destroy }
pack
end

win_w, win_h = 300, 80
win_l = (TkWinfo.screenwidth('.') - win_w) / 2
root.geometry("#{win_w}x#{win_h}+#{win_l}+50")
root.resizable(false, false)

# Make Cmnd+Q work as expected on Mac OS X.
root.bind('Command-q') { Tk.root.destroy }

Tk.mainloop

ensure
puts DEBUG unless DEBUG.empty?
end

Regards, Morton

5

From: Morton G. [email protected]
Subject: Re: Combo boxes in Ruby-Tk
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 09:41:03 +0900
Message-ID: [email protected]

That’s an interesting example, but are spin boxes really the same as
combo boxes? The OP may also want to look at Tk::Iwidgets::Combobox.
Here is a minimal example.

Please see ‘ext/sample/tkcombobox.rb’ on Ruby source tree also. :wink:

6

Morton G. wrote:

That’s an interesting example, but are spin boxes really the same as
combo boxes? The OP may also want to look at Tk::Iwidgets::Combobox.

Thank you - that seems to do the trick.

Rosie