I found a good editor which was written in TCL, which is about 50k in size, which was named ML Tcl/tk Text Editor - v1.12.  You can edit up to 10 files at the same time. Nice.  Some good features in there:

• cut/copy/paste
• Find/replace
• Printing
• etc.
  

It did look something like this (which was pretty good ten years ago).

• 'Save'
• 'Save and Run' or
• 'Save and Run ../main.tcl'

This is great whether you're running straight .tcl files or you're editing a .tcl file within a starkit, and you need to run main.tcl to run the starkit, without having to re-Wrap it first. Then after you get it working correctly, you should Wrap, Test, and then Copy it off to another directory (in case you mess it up later).   If you don't understand what I just said, allow me to ask questions for you.

Wait a minute... I know TCL is Tools Command Language. You said "Wrap" it. With what. What is a starkit?

   Well a starkit could be quite small (or fairly large, especially when unWrapped). When it is executed, it is really a zipped file, that will unzip itself into memory, and then execute.

So what do I need to run it?

   What you need to run it, even if you don't know TCL at all, is that you can run it without having to install all of TCL (which is around 32 gigs) and instead have only one file to run it which is around 4 gigs. One can find them here. The file is named something like this:

• tclkit852.exe
• tclkit-8.5.8-win32-x86_64.exe

   Good questions.  Both files have the tcl in there, but different versions of tcl, which is up to 8.5.8 right now. You can see that one is 8.5.2 and the other is 8.5.8. the remainder of the the filename is what platform it runs on (win32-x86) Windows XP and up and one happens to be a 64 bit version.  So tclkit-8.5.8-win32-x86_64.exe is that. The tclkit-8.5.8-win32-x86_64.zip is under 2 gig, and unzips to tclkit-8.5.8-win32-x86_64.exe at around 4 gig. A kit version is just a runtime version of TCL. It can run anything that really is a foo.kit file.

What's the difference between a kit file and a starkit?

   Well it's pretty simple, starkit are kit files.

A .kit file contains all the files necessary to execute the kit file, which could be many. They have all been zipped. They will unzip into memory, and run in memory.  They will have a directory structure and perhaps many files in them under different folders. A real kit file (starkit) can turn into an executable (foo.exe) with a penalty of the size of an executable tclkit. You can read more about starkits here if you want to learn more about them.  A special version of a starkit is a starpack which includes tclkit inside of it, which makes it completely executable.  This is good but it makes it quite a bit larger.

So if I have a foo.tcl file, how do I turn it into a  or starkit file?

   Well, what you need is SDX. You use it to convert it to a foo.kit. You need to use it to regularly Wrap foo.kit. It is kind of wierd running it on Windows. What you have to do is Qwrap it first, then Unwrap it next.
Then what you need to do is find the proper folder which was just created 'foo.vfs/lib/app-foo' and edit foo.tcl.    You can look here or here to find out about SDX.

What's Next?

  So let's say you're editing foo.tcl under the folder  'foo.vfs/lib/app-foo'.
Go ahead and make some changes. When you're done what you should do is save it, then re-Wrap it, and then you can test it.
Ouch got an error in syntax. Ok.. Go back and fix the error by trying to change the source to what it should be and rerun the sentence above.
It's commands are kind of simple but a pain to type. Ouch it seems like it's kind of a pain doesn't it?

What did you do?

    Well first didn't I tell you about my version of ML 1.2x.x? It's got a right-click pop-up menu where you can 'Save and Run ../main.tcl'.

What does saving the file you're working on and 'Run ../main.tcl' do?

• Saving
• re-Wrapping
  
• re-Executing.
  

• foo.tcl
• foo.kit