With Tk there is lot of cruft accumulated, and there are pretty complicated solutions to simple problems, that, although ugly, DO WORK.

If you don't want to bury yourself in those details, choose something better designed... or rather 'designed in modern times'.

I've hit similiar walls trying to work with ncurses - it's very old, there are loads of working applications outthere, but you've got no working higher-level toolkits like Cdk or similiar to 'Turbo Vision', and people just learned how to adjust...

OTOH having worked with Tk, moving to perl's Gtk2 was just pure pleasure, without experiences with Tk, fltk etc.. I would just take Gtk for granted and would bitch about it alot... ( especially since there are some snags in Gtk2, the advantage is that they're being worked-on, and there's hope of seeing fixes soon, with things like Tk - no fixes for you.)