pack is one of several Geometry managers supported by Tk.
http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/pack.htm
If the first argument to pack is a window name (any value starting with “.”), then the command is processed in the same way as pack configure.
See http://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/contrib/packLet.html for an interactive demo.
HJG 2005-06-21 /usr/local/web/docs.main/products/tcltk/plugin/contrib/packLet.tcl": no such file or directory
Geometry management is an aspect of programming where personal style seems to dominate. That is, given the same lay description of a desired appearance, some programmers will use pack, some grid, some will reach for SpecTcl, and so on. Joe English, for example, has written
while David Cuthbert's experience teaches him that
EE: Actually, while I agree that having to put things into frames just to make them align the way I want is an inconvenience, it doesn't have to change the names of the widgets. You can just create the new frame as a sibling of the widgets it needs to contain, and [pack $top.w -in $top.frame].
Roy Terry is among pack's fans who emphasizes that it's like Tcl itself--it make people who expect it to be something other than what it is unhappy. He underscores the importance of "distinguishing between parcel space (-expand) and widget/slave (-fill)", which the current (8.4) documentation fails to do adequately.
AET: Had terrible trouble understanding pack till reading Walsh et al's "Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk", which makes it clear. Once you get your head around it, it is very quick to use.
RS If one dimension is good enough for me, I still often use pack. Here's a simple "2-D" example with a subframe, as mentioned above:
frame .top label .top.1 -text Hello button .top.2 -text world -command exit eval pack [winfo children .top] -side left text .t label .bottom -text "This goes below" eval pack [winfo children .] ;# -side top is default
Notice the eval pack idiom, which saves you keeping track of the children...
LV Anyone have a pointer to a wiki page that describes the notation used for screen distances as used by pack's -pad type options? I see values like 2, .5c, 7m and so forth. Where do I read about the valid values? EKB I was just wondering the same thing! I made a page for screen distances.
Smartpack : A little tool to help script hierarchies of frames using the pack layout manager.