I wish I’d learned Tkinter sooner

https://github.com/rogersavage/tkshortcut

I don’t think anyone should actually use the above repo except as an example. I currently haven’t made any attempts to improve the code I typed in while working my way through a few Tkinter tutorials over the course of about two hours. But here I have an application I find genuinely useful.

I’m someone who greatly enjoys spending as much time as possible in a vanilla terminal, and I’m gradually getting drawn into the “Vim Keys Everywhere” lifestyle/ideology. My preferred file manager is Vifm, I browse the web using Firefox + Tridactyl, I listen to music using Musikcube, I struggle with the urge to stop people on the street to tell them about my Herbstluftwm configuration.

But when I’m using a floating window manager, doing mouse-driven activities like using Gimp or Audacity, playing games, etc., I don’t necessarily want to open up a config file and worry about whether the key=value pairs are supposed to have spaces next to the equals sign, or how to capitalize the keywords.

I’m currently taking a Coursera course on audio signal processing for music applications, which has me using and looking at basic Tkinter-based utilities extensively for the first time, and I was finally tempted to start learning the library for myself. I use a compact Debian-based distribution called antiX, which I’m thrilled with overall, but sometimes I miss having very simple things like being able to double click something and quickly create a desktop shortcut without typing out a text file by hand. Within two hours of clicking on my first Tkinter tutorial, I had a genuinely useful application.

My code doesn’t really even bear discussion. (It hardly bears looking at.) Create some text boxes and buttons, call the built-in file picker, then write four lines of text to a file. It’s just gratifying to know that, in the future, creating small GUI utilities for myself can be a standard part of the way I use my computer.

All of which is to say, I don’t think I’ll ever discount the value of rapid development.