TkView

Description

TkView is a pager, a replacement for programs like more or less. It can be used wherever you would use e.g. less. TkView has been written in Tcl/Tk. Some of TkView's differences compared to less are:

• TkView opens a new window for every file you are viewing.
• TkView has an intuitive user-interface.
• TkView keeps watching the file or pipe it is reading and if the file grows or more data comes from the pipe it is appended to the text already in the window.
• TkView can be made to always keep the end of the file visible in the window (like tail -f).
• You can save all or part of the text to a file.
• You can print the text.
• You can make the font larger or smaller.
• Aside from printing, the same program should work also on inferior operating systems like Windows and Macintosh!
• And the only downside is: it does not work without X

Download

Download the v. 1.1.5 of TkView (tv for short).

Installation

TkView (tv for short) is just a Tcl/Tk script file. You save it anywhere you like and turn on the execute permissions (chmod +x tv).

User settings

There are mainly 3 variables that are meant for user settings: fontFamily, fontSize and text2ps.

The fontFamily is something like Courier, Helvetica, Arial, Times, ... The fontSize is the font size in points: 10, 11, 12, ... The text2ps is a command that reads ascii text and writes out PostScript. This is used by the Print command.

The default values for these are: Courier, 12 and "mpage -2 -l -da -bA4"

To change these, create a file in your home directory called .tvrc and place commands like this in it:

set text2ps "nenscript -2r -p-"
set fontFamily Lucidatypewriter

Usage

You can use TkView just like any other pager, like less:

Automatically called pager: PAGER=tv; export PAGER; man ls

File viewer: tv file1 file2 file3 ...

View output of pipelines: tbl file.me | nroff -me | tv

Watch log files grow (click on radiobutton Tail): tv /var/log/messages

Notice to Tcl 8.0 users

The versions of TkView before 1.1.3 did not work well with Tcl versions < 8.1. (The nroff-formatting was broken.) I've now found out the problem: Before 8.1 Tcl regexp command did not expand backslash sequences, it was left for the parser to do it. I had put the \b inside curly braces which protected it from the parser. I put it inside double-quotes instead. Now TkView can be used by Tcl 8.0 users also. This is a boon because e.g. major Linux distributions still ship with Tcl 8.0 included.

To do

Line numbers would be nice. And bookmarks (mark a place / places in a long file, jump to it / them with some easy way). Write a man page. Wrap the whole thing into an RPM file, ...

These things might take some time since I'm now working on my own Tcl/Tk based editor... it's coming along nicely.

Author

Sami Tikka

License

The permission to use, modify and distribute this program for any purpose is granted as long as you do not make false claims of authorship.

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