VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 08 2022 - 14:09:13 CST

Hi,
  To be clear, VMD itself is completely uninvolved in things like low-level
keystroke processing in general, and particularly not at the level of
Tcl or Python scripts or plugins that have Tk GUI windows, such as TkCon.

On Macs, low level event processing for the various plugin GUI windows
is handled by the Tk library, and similarly the core VMD GUI windows
and their low level event processing are managed by FLTK.

If you google Tk and MacOS, you'll see that people from other communities
such as Python tkinter users are complaining about various things too:
  https://www.python.org/download/mac/tcltk/
  https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/683597

We're chasing a moving target with MacOS continuing to remain
much less stable than other platforms, despite our efforts.
I'm working on building newer versions of Tk >= 8.6.12 for VMD that should
address some of the problems that have been reported on MacOS recently.

My suggestion is to keep your eye on what's happening with other
similar software tools on MacOS, as many are built using the same
software components like Tk, etc. In general I do not recommend that
people upgrade to the latest revs of MacOS until they know that their
key software tools are stable with them, since Apple continues to
break GUI toolkits like Tk that are widely used by cross-platform
open source scientific tools such as VMD.

Best,
  John

On Tue, Feb 08, 2022 at 02:45:56PM -0500, Giacomo Fiorin wrote:
> There are probably many people on the list in your same situation, but it
> is really another issue related to the ongoing changes in Apple's ecosystem 

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