Hi hudo,

I've had a lot of good luck using the Text and ROText widgets for this kind of thing.  Both of your requirements, sorting and displaying in different colors, are quite easy using either widget (but should be easy to do anyway, regardless of which widget you choose).

Here's a short example I've written to show you how to to sort items and display them in a ROText widget:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Tk; 
use Tk::ROText; 


# User-defined
my $textfont = "Helvetica 12";
my @colors = qw( peachpuff lightyellow );
my @items = (
    'blue',
    'orange',
    'white',
    'red',
    'gray',
    'yellow',
    'purple',
    'tan',
    'pink',
    'green',
    'black',
);


# Globals
my @all_items  = ( );
my $item_count = 0;


# Main program
my $mw  = new MainWindow;
my $f1  = $mw->Frame()->pack(-expand => 0, -fill => 'x');
my $f2  = $mw->Frame()->pack(-expand => 1, -fill => 'both');
my $ps  = sub { $mw->destroy() };
my $b1  = button($f1, 'Exit',   'right', $ps, "Escape");
my $b2  = button($f1, 'Clear',  'left',  sub { clear_all() });
my $b3  = button($f1, 'Insert', 'left',  sub { insert_all() });
my $txt = $f2->Scrolled('ROText', -scrollbars => 'osoe')->pack();
insert_all();
MainLoop;


# Subroutines
sub button {
    my ($w, $text, $side, $psub, $bind) = @_;
    $bind ||= 0;
    $bind and $text .= " ($bind)";
    my $btn = $w->Button(-bg => 'skyblue', -text => $text);
    if ($psub || 0) {
        $btn->configure(-command => $psub);
        $bind and $mw->bind("<$bind>" => sub { $btn->invoke() });
    }
    $btn->pack(-side => $side);
    return $btn;
}


sub clear_all {
    # Delete all items in the Text widget
    @all_items = ( );
    $txt->delete("1.0", "end");
    $item_count = 0;
}


sub insert_all {
    # Delete the contents of the Text widget first
    $txt->delete("1.0", "end");
    $item_count = 0;

    # Sort the items, adding each to the Text widget
    push @all_items, @items;
    my @sorted = sort @all_items;
    foreach (@sorted) {
        insert_item($_);
    }
}


sub insert_item {
    my ($text) = @_;
    my $tag = "item_" . ++$item_count;
    my $bg = $colors[$item_count % @colors];
    $txt->tagConfigure($tag, -font => $textfont, -background => $bg);
    $txt->insert("end", "$text\n", $tag);
}
[download]

The trick is that, each time you click on the "Insert" button, it clears the ROText widget first, then adds the list of colors into the full list @all_items, sorts the full list, and displays it.

The multiple colors are achieved by keeping track of how many items have been added to the list (with $item_count), and displaying one or the other of the colors in @colors.

Hopefully, the above example will give you some ideas about how to get started.

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