Re: [MACTCL] Run tcl scripts by double clicking

[Kevin W. <kw...@co...>]

On 9/21/13 8:52 AM, Bernhard Spinnler wrote:
> So my question is: why hasn't this been implemented this way? Why is this not the default Wish behavior on the Mac? Are there any drawbacks/problems with this approach?

I can't speak for the design decisions of prior maintainers, but I can 
think of at least a few reasons why this might not be the optimal approach:

1. :tk::mac::OpenDocument is intended to be a general-purpose 
placeholder for opening documents in Wish, but it is used more often for 
actually opening and displaying a document in an editor. Re-purposing 
this command's default mode to executing a Tcl script would cause a lot 
of complication for apps using the command for other purposes--this 
includes some of my own apps and apps such as IDLE, the Tk-based editor 
that ships with MacPython.

2. There is an argument to be made that automatically executing an 
arbitrary script may present security issues. MacPython does come with a 
bundled script launcher app that does what you are looking for, and 
there's been a lot of debate recently about removing it because of what 
some argue is the security risk.

3. There are much simpler ways to implement the behavior you're looking 
for without the overhead of re-defining a central command in Tk-Mac or 
updating and deploying a full-blown app launcher (I once looked at 
Launcher's source code and there was a lot going on there).  One is to 
launch Wish and the script name from Terminal: "wish foo.tcl." That's my 
preferred method of running scripts. Another way would be to implement a 
simple AppleScript launcher that is associated with Tcl files (in the 
manner you've already done with Wish) and runs Wish when a script is 
double-clicked. Below I've posted the source code for a similar app I 
wrote years ago that launched Scribus when it was just an X11 app in 
FInk. I'll leave the modification of it as an exercise for you, but it 
would achieve exactly what you are looking to do, and if you wanted to 
share your resulting project with the community, I'm sure plenty of 
people would find it useful:

property extension_list : {"sla", "sla.gz", "scd", "scd.gz"}

on run
	display dialog "Scribus will launch after the X11 application has 
finished launching."
	delay 5
	tell application "X11"
		activate
	end tell
	delay 10
	set theEnv to "export DISPLAY=:0;"
	set theBoot to "source /sw/bin/init.sh;"
	set theCmd to "/sw/bin/scribus "
	do shell script theEnv & theBoot & theCmd
end run


on open this_item
	set the item_info to info for this_item
	if the name extension of the item_info is in the extension_list then
		display dialog "Scribus will open this document after the X11 
application has finished launching."
		delay 5
		tell application "X11"
			activate
		end tell
		delay 10
		set theEnv to "export DISPLAY=:0;"
		set theBoot to "source /sw/bin/init.sh;"
		set theCmd to "/sw/bin/scribus "
		set theFile to quoted form of POSIX path of this_item
		do shell script theEnv & theBoot & theCmd & theFile
	else
		display dialog "Scribus is unable to open this file type."
	end if
end open

Hope this helps,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com