Installing Tk On Windows

On Windows, the easiest way to get Tcl/Tk onto your machine is to install the "ActiveTcl" distribution from ActiveState. In your web browser, go to activestate, and follow along the links to download the Community Edition of ActiveTcl for Windows. Make sure you're downloading an 8.6.x version. Note that you will need to create an account with ActiveState (no cost) to download it.

Run the installer, and follow along. You'll end up with a fresh install of ActiveTcl, usually located in C:\ActiveTcl. From a command prompt, you should then be able to run a Tcl/Tk 8.6 shell via:

% C:\ActiveTcl\bin\wish

This should pop up a small window titled "wish", which will contain your application. A second, larger window titled "Console" is where you can type in Tcl/Tk commands. To verify the exact version of Tcl/Tk that you are running, type the following:

% info patchlevel

We want this to be returning something like '8.6.9'.

Type "exit" in the console window to exit. You may also want to add C:\ActiveTcl\bin to your PATH environment variable.

Note: verified install using ActiveTcl 8.6.9.8609-2 on Windows 10.