I was talking to another programmer last week about text editors for programming. I mentioned the sad state of editors for the Mac.

I’ve known about BBEdit for the Mac for ages and I was considering it when looking for a good text editor. Glad I didn’t. I ended up with Textmate but it falls short (more in a bit). I probably use vim more than Textmate.

I decided I want to give Tcl/Tk coding another shot on the Mac again.

First, time to hit the Activestate site again. ActiveTcl is the package to get (for windows or the Mac). Took way too many clicks to get it but that’s just poor website design.

Second, the part I was dreading. Finding a text editor that had at least syntax hilighting for Tcl/Tk and code folding. No Textmate bundle for the language and I didn’t really want to spend the time to create one (and I shouldn’t have to). I took another look at BBEdit but it didn’t what I needed either.

Back to the Activestate sit again because I know that they have an editor specifically geared for the language (and perl also). And the personal version is a great price, included a debugger also.

Much to my surprise they no longer have that version of Komodo. They now call it “Komodo Edit” and it’s free. They removed the debugger but not a big deal. I can always spend close to $300 to upgrade to “Komodo IDE”.

Anyway too many clicks later and I have that downloaded and installed.

Worth the time to download, it’s a really good editor for Tcl/Tk.

Now the part that really makes me grit my teeth. You cannot double-click on a Tcl/Tk script ie. a fully GUI script, to run it. WTF!?

I had to google to find out if/how it can be done. I think this something the ActiveTcl installer should have set up already. As I type this I still haven’t got it working yet.

Here we have a gui based os with probably the easiest language to write a GUI app in… and it can’t be done. What’s wrong with this picture?