Limiting scroll bar length

Question

I am trying to create a simple notepad like GUI using Perl Tk. I have used the Scrolled widget to create a Text widget with two scrollbars - one on the right and one on the bottom. The place where the two scrollbars meet looks like this:

However I would like to make it look like what is seen in the "Notepad" application by Microsoft. This is how I want it:

As you can see, there is a now an "empty square" where the two scrollbars meet. One more feature of notepad is that this "square" can be used to resize the window size. I want to be able to achieve the same.

How do I go about doing this?

Thanks!

Circuity

You know, if you accept an answer once in a while, it make people more motivated to answer other questions you may have. – Onionskin

Answer 1

The trick is to place the widgets with the grid geometry manager, which essentially creates an (uneven-sized) 4x4 grid with the text widget at "North-West", the vertical scrollbar at "North-East", the horizontal scrollbar at "South-West", and the empty square at "South-East". There is a relevant example on the man page.

I think I'm allowed to quote the man page example as fair use (noting that it's Copyright © 1995-1997 Roger E. Critchlow Jr. Copyright © 1996 Sun Microsystems, Inc.).

# Make the widgets
toplevel .t
text .t.txt -wrap none -xscroll {.t.h set} -yscroll {.t.v set}
scrollbar .t.v -orient vertical   -command {.t.txt yview}
scrollbar .t.h -orient horizontal -command {.t.txt xview}

# Lay them out
grid .t.txt .t.v -sticky nsew
grid .t.h        -sticky nsew

# Tell the text widget to take all the extra room
grid rowconfigure    .t .t.txt -weight 1
grid columnconfigure .t .t.txt -weight 1

You'll have translate to Perl-Tk yourself, however. There is some Perl-Tk-related discussion of grid (though not specifically about scrollbars) here at TkDocs that might get you started. The "Learning Perl/Tk" sample chapter Geometry Management also discusses grid.

Oh! You wanted a resizing control in the fourth square as well. In Tcl/T(t)k, it's called a ttk::sizegrip and it's documented here. I've never used it myself (as there are other ways to resize the window) and don't know if it's in Perl-Tk. If it's not, there is a wiki page discussing how to fake it (again, I've never tried that code myself).

Onionskin

grid is indeed the way to solve this and the scrollbar problem is the original motivating use case; before it was invented, you had to do nasty tricks in pack with frames as spacers, and it was really quite hard to get right. – Mikkimiko