But anyway, modern means things like pull down menus

does the current tk interface not only support pulling down of menus, but also tearing off? most of the qt/wx/gtk interfaces do not by default allow tearing off, if that's your thing...perhaps youre thinking of the 'drop down listbox' of which there are multitudes of no-extensions-needed tk-based widgets ?...

drag + drop,

http://tkdnd.sourceforge.net/ - there are many tk packages which support drag and drop within the canvas, but this one seems to be the most full featured in also allowing drag events originating in the OS file browser, works at least from ie and explorer @ windows, rox & konqueror @ linux.., i use it to drag vst plugins, soundfiles, etc into patches already, and when mathieu has a chance to fix some bugs with his developmental version of pd there is other stuff to check in, like dropping abstractions into a patch from a file browser and having them instantiated at the place you let up the mouse, etc....

i'm sure you have many more ideas for drag'n'drop that i havent thought of, and i cant think of a simpler/faster/easier way than TK where your ideas can be implemented in a myriad of ways with 1 line messages to a tot object in your patch...

nested windows with scroll bars. Basically the kind of widgets available in larger applications on Linux, OS X and Windows.

you can surely do this as well, with tk, you have a choice of many window layout styles from packing objects inside eachother, to relative grids that resize with the window, yadda yadda..and if youre obsessed with having your creations look like the host OS you can use their native drawing API instead of the tk crossplatform default: http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/ ---- altho my experience with gui interfaces is mainly limited to dhtml & tk, i get the impression that wx/gtk/qt are geared towards merely providing 'container' objects for various types of lists and text, any sort of drawing areas are mainly DIY where you have to come up with stuff from scratch..and most of these are C based and have a set-it-and-forget it (or recompile..) mentality versus the realtime dynamic nature of tk...

i know someone who recently purchased max and they told me that they mainly did so for its "LCD" object, i have not used max and cant find much via google about the LCD but apparently it is related to building custom GUIs, something which tk is perfect for..the main thing needed imo is a better way to mix 'struct' and 'non-struct' tk to fully flesh out the custom interface. TOT is good, but i thinhk something integrated and a bit less convoluted would be great (tot has all sorts of character remaps for [ and { and ' and \ etc to keep it from getting munged...)

but if you have examples of really cool shit done w/ other toolkits i'd love to see it...

cr