VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 17 2007 - 15:59:16 CST

Eric,
  I've witnessed a number of strange behaviors with the MacOS X version
of Tk running on the x86 macs, some of which were pointed out by
other observant users like yourself. I'm planning on building an updated
version of Tk shortly to see if the newer versions have corrected these
issues. The FLTK toolkit used by the main VMD graphical interfaces
also has a few small bugs on MacOS X Intel.

The problems I've noticed on the x86 macs include unusual mouse cursor
bitmap images, dropped keystrokes in Tk windows, incorrect mouse focus
behavior when switching windows, and internal Tk debugging messages being
printed under some circumstances. I've previously tried using the version
of Tk that Apple ships, but their version is based on an older Tk release
and has more bugs than the version I compiled myself. I'll have to get
back to you on this after I test the newest Tk release and see if things
have improved on this front.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 01:48:58PM -0800, Eric Peterson wrote:
> When I use the VMD TkConsole (Extensions -> Tk Console) I am finding that
> keystrokes are being randomly dropped. For instance, I may type "play
> myscript.tcl" on the keyboard and what actually comes up in the console is
> "ply mycript.tl" because several keystrokes were randomly ignored.
>
> Also, I sometimes have difficulty getting the focus back on the TkConsole
> window after focusing another window; clicking in the TkConsole makes the
> window active but no cursor appears and all keystrokes are ignored. Using
> Expose to focus the window sometimes seems to help with the problem.
>
> Anyone else experienced these issues?
>
> I am using VMD 1.8.5 on a MacBook Pro C2D running Mac OS 10.4.8.
> 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078