Updated 2014-12-01 05:28:25 by REB

GEN | General Utilities For Tcl edit

Gen is a general utilities library for Tcl. Also, Gen is free (same license as Tcl itself). It is available on my personal site as well as on GitHub and Gitorious (see 03|Getting It).

01| What It Is

The idea behind Gen is simple -- make it a little bit easier to write Tcl programs. Gen is supposed to be code that you could well write yourself but do not want to have to.

Why? Because you are already trying to solve some other problems. For instance, let us say you want to write the contents of a variable to a file. You can look up the command syntax and get it done in several lines of code. It is not a question of what you are capable of but what is more convenient for you. In this case, it is more convenient to just call String2File. Because this is quicker, it helps you to keep your focus on your main problem and keep your flow going.

02| What Good It Is

  • 52 Commands to make coding that much easier for you.
  • Every command fully documented in the same style as Tcl, including examples.
  • Extensive test suite using tcltest. Hits every command and doubles as code samples.
  • Offline Compiled HTML Help file complete with keyword index and full text search.
  • Again, Gen is free.

03| Getting It

  • You can download it from here
  • Gen also has repos up:
  • Never installed a Tcl package? It is easy. Here are screencasts that show how to do it on Windows and Linux.
  • Further information is on the homepage and in the README.txt file included in the package.

We hope you will find Gen to be a help with your work in Tcl!