It has been said many times before—don’t reinvent the wheel. This is also true for Tcl. While Tcl was once called “A surprisingly well-kept secret,” ^[8] it has always had a large group of enthusiasts writing and contributing software in the open source spirit. Many high-quality, freely available extensions and Tcl programs are available through the Internet Tcl Archive, currently located at Neosoft, Inc.

BLT, Tix, and [incr Widgets] provide many additional Tk widgets, including those to support charts, panned frames, tabbed notebook frames, and combo entry/selections. Sybtcl, Oratcl, and Tclodbc support commercial relational databases. Extended Tcl (TclX) provides access to many Unix system programming interfaces and supports additional commands to manipulate lists, perform file scanning, and provide a Tcl help facility. Expect automates interactions with other programs, and [incr Tcl] adds object-oriented programming features to Tcl.

Many applications written in Tcl/Tk are also available: mail user agents, HTML browsers and editors, calendar programs, and a selection of games are all available in source code for your use and review. Other sources for Tcl software include the Tcl/Tk CD-ROM available from the Tcl Consortium.