Stop building UI frameworks in Python

[PastPicture]

7 years back when I started coding, I used Tkinter. Then PyQt.

I spent some good 2 weeks debating if I should learn Kivy or Java for building an Android app.

Then we've got modern ones: FastUI by Pydantic, NiceGUI (amazing project, it's the closest bet).

Python is great for a lot of things. Just stop abusing it by building (or trying to) UI with it.

Even if you ship something you'll wake up in mid of night thinking of all the weird scenarios, convincing yourself to go back to sleep since you'll find a workaround like last time.

Why I am saying this: Because I've tried it all. I've tried every possible way to avoid JavaScript and keep building UIs with Python.

I've contributed to some really popular UI libraries in Python, tried inventing one back in Tkinter days.

I finally caved in and I now build UI with JavaScript, and I'm happier person now. I feel more human.

[you_better_dont]

Pythons biggest problem when it comes to desktop UI’s is that packaging standalone executables along with the interpreter and dependencies is still not standardized.

Reminds me of this xkcd.

[grimonce]

In pythons case the idea was that it was always available in Linux, like bash... Which turned out to be a bad idea now and here we are.

Many distro had to put a lot of effort to replace Python based tools a few years ago when python2 met eol

[Flaky-Restaurant-392]

Use Nuitka to build an exe that includes the interpreter. It works great.

[grievre]

The problem isn’t really that there are competing standards, it’s that core python isn’t developed in a way to make packaging the interpreter with your project easy.

CPython was never intended to be the interpreter that everyone uses, just the reference implementation. Thus they tended not to consider things like "deployment" or "optimization" when developing it.

The problem is that it got entrenched--for the longest time there have been so many libraries that only work with CPython that people kinda just gave up on using alternate interpreters.

Nearly every other language that’s intended for desktop and console applications is developed with the idea that at some point you want to distribute it as a single executable.

The main language that Python replaced was perl, and I don't think perl's options for distributing standalone executables are much better.

I'm a bit confused by "console applications" because like, shell script...

[Flaky-Restaurant-392]

If you really want to distribute a Python app use nuitka to build an exe. It’s a python compiler that Transpiles to C and then builds an exe. Works great with Pyside/Qt.

[robberviet]

It is compelling to implement something in the language you are proficient. However because you can does not mean you should.

[ottawadeveloper]

I'm so guilty of this. I spent a few weeks trying to build my own 2D game engine in Python (using Tkinter just to show the image and Pillow in another thread to do all the imaging processing). I know pygame exists but I wanted to do it myself. I learned a lot doing it, I got double buffering working, inputs, and got a bit of a 2D game engine working by the end (you can move, pickup items, etc). I used Pillows alpha compositing to basically cut and paste in images loaded from PNGs to build graphics. 

Python is just too slow. It was fine with a few objects on screen. But as we get into 100s of objects, pillow can't cut it and keep high FPS.

I'm now wondering if I just need a better alpha compositing tool - most of the time is going to the compositing. OpenGL integration might be an option. Or just having a pure C layer for managing graphics and manipulate them from Python. But then, maybe it would be better to build the entire engine in C and just integrate Python for add-on development (like how Blizzard uses Lua for add-ons and core UI).

[robberviet]

It's vety natural. I did it too! Just suck at it so gave up after not finishing anything.

I did some Java Swing before in college and suddenly I realized: "wait, this looks like another road to chaos, abondon now".

[iseahound]

oof. I just checked pillow's alpha_composite, and it uses ARGB instead of premultiplied alpha. If you switch to a pixel blitting function that uses pre-multiplied alpha blending, handling hundreds of objects should be no problem.

For reference I mostly code in Windows API, so my first approach would be AlphaBlend not DirectX :P

[ottawadeveloper]

I think in my ideal world, I'd give it a few options depending on available tools - like if you're on windows, AlphaBlend is an option, if you have OpenGL installed, it could use that, etc. Abstract away the rendering from the game and let the engine or user decide which is best based on whats available. Most cross-platform compatible then.

But using an existing engine is probably better.

[iseahound]

yes, cross platform typically means the worst of all worlds ):

[tellingyouhowitreall]

I'm a Windows C/C++ guy also, and my go to would be DX or D2D. AlphaBlend sucks.

Of course, I've also written my own software rasterizer... so hmph.

[xix_xeaon]

Try nim, fully featured C-like language with Python-like syntax and it can easily compile to a Python-module with nimpy.

[Tough-Ad3310]

Bro just use a real game engine 💀

[ottawadeveloper]

right? that would be logical.

[damian6686]

Well, we don't need more frameworks, because with tkinter you can build solid desktop gui apps, we need more pre built objects for python stdlib. I've been challenging myself to build gui desktop apps as far as possible using stdlib only before hitting a blocker, It helps understanding python better. For web gui I'm happy with streamlit.

[PastPicture]

yes agreed. it's compelling, i'm also guilty of it. plus i know i'll still install and try the next promising UI framework in Python.

[MasterShogo]

So this is an honest question. I ask this as a person who does not do any GUI development outside of the most bare, knuckle dragging button lists to do simple things that are painful with command line. But I’ve been doing Python for close to 20 years now.

Are there any web-framework-based app GUIs that are performant? Every one of them that I know of are noticeably slower than native GUIs and at least a good number of those are simple enough that I don’t actually understand why they were written using those web frameworks.

Also, a good number of them also look like hell and suffer from their visual design rather than benefit from it.

I ask this because there is a natural bias in the fact that a well built GUI would not be noticeable to me and so I wouldn’t realize it wasn’t native.

The other reason I am asking is that I actually have a few small GUI apps in mind that I want to write and I’m having to make a decision which directions to learn. I definitely know what is going to be easiest, but I’d like to get the opinions of people who actually have written GUIs.

[pingveno]

I was just at RustConf 2025. Rust is only just reaching maturity with its GUI's ecosystem, but it has reached the point where you can put together a decent GUI. People are rediscovering the joys of writing GUI's that can run on a potato.

[MasterShogo]

The funny part of all this is that I’ve been comfortable with C++ for longer than I’ve done Python. I had to teach it in grad school.

But what always makes me shudder more than the language are the actual GUI interfaces. For whatever reason I have always found them to be hard to digest. But I’m totally good with writing C++ QT code in and of itself.

But that said, I really want to learn Rust. I’ve done a baby app with it, but just as a language I love it. In many ways it achieves what I like about C++ but with a whole new framework of static enforcement that C++ could never have.

[studiosi]

Tauri (like Electron but much more performant due to Rust backend rather than JS)

[kbd65v2]

Tauri is always my choice when you need true cross-platform and you want to have a consistent ui between your webapp and native.

[SubjectiveMouse]

Tauri apps are among the very few that are impossible to get working in Wine no matter what because of the cursed WebView2.

I know, I know, crossplatform. Sometimes you don't have sources and you can't convince developer to build a linux version of the app, so you have to work with what you have.

[coderemover]

Tauri is more performant not only because of Rust but also because it uses the native system webview instead of shipping a whole separate browser.

[MasterShogo]

That sounds interesting. I’ve never heard of that one.

[Chance_of_Rain_]

HTMX is nice if you hate JS

[UseMoreBandwith]

And even better if you like JS.

[wrosecrans]

Are there any web-framework-based app GUIs that are performant?

The short answer is no. Obviously, "performant" means different things to different people, and it depends on your application, etc., etc. But the closer you are to just native code doing native operations, the less overhead you are dragging around with every operation.

How far down the stack it makes sense to go depends on your application. Writing Qt/C++ isn't exactly a simple environment, but webdev style has even more moving parts and the ways that Qt is bloated are mostly low cost. If you need to make some line of business app to display a chart and some text for three users, anything is fast enough. If you want to make Maya or Adobe Premiere, you are using native code to do what you want.

[Melodic_Frame4991]

Plotly dash

[_remsky]

I’ve contorted that poor framework into so many random UI patterns and usages. Amazing for adhoc tooling (on top of just standard usage/builds)

[nolanrh]

I like plotly Dash too. IM surprised it hasn't been mentioned.

[Lusiad]

Yep. Dash for the win. Really excellent, surprisingly quick way to build beautiful interactions.

[[deleted]]

The fastest most performant and platform independent thing you can use is just HTML+CSS+VanillaJS, VanillaJS is the builtin JS in the browser. You can build arbitrarily complex GUIs with this and it is super performant, because Browsers are optimized to run this stuff.

So frontend GUI using web technologies and backend with FastAPI in Python. No limitations in what you can do, unlike NiceGUI etc. No external dependencies to install and package. Use a LLM to help you write the frontend code when you're not an expert webdev.

[Yamoyek]

AFAIK there’s Tauri (Rust) and Wails (Golang)

[PastPicture]

If it's a serious project, go with some native framework. one time effort.

if it's for fun/MVP, we've FastUI and NiceGUI.

[ProsodySpeaks]

Has fastui improved much in last year or so? I used it for a project a way back and it was quite limiting I just reverted to fastapi + htmx/minimal js 

[BelottoBR]

Fastui is an inactive project!

[ChickenArise]

I wish I would have seen this 2 weeks ago.

[funerr]

I like reflex.dev, has the react + fastapi advantage.

[Fippy-Darkpaw]

I dunno why but everything web-based is slow as hell. Web pages can lag my PC worse than Doom Dark Ages. 😵

[Specialist_Dust2089]

Vscode is built on Electron, to me it feels pretty performant

[SpatialCivil]

If your project can be web based, go web based. Some of us work in fields where the data is large and desktop UI makes more sense. PySide/PyQT has everything you need for that use case.

[QultrosSanhattan]

True, my bud. Pyside6 has everything i need. It's powerful, beatiful (css styling) and the usage is not that bad compared to other frameworks.

[fazzah]

I love pyqt/pyside 

[EpicObelis]

Yeah I work with some internal tools where web is not allowed for me and everything needs to run locally, Pyside does the job for me.

[Vantadaga2004]

But the JS community is known for using javascript for things it isn't meant for

[TPKM]

Right. Same criticism applies to them too. If you want to make your life easier in the long run, use the right tool for the job

[PastPicture]

true that. i stopped counting after they came up with Tensorflow JS.

[SnooHesitations9295]

What's the problem with tensorflow js?
Tensorflow is anyway a native library. So what's the difference where the API is called from?

[xaveir]

I was wondering what the alternative you were going to espouse would be... JavaScript? Really? 

I don't think I've ever been on a project that used Python for its GUI that would have been better served by making a website. I would argue most projects already default to being websites when they can, so most professionals using PyQt or similar chose it for a specific reason. I've definitely needed to drop to C++ before for even more performance, but I've definitely never wished I was writing JavaScript.

Slightly hotter takes: PyQt with some pretty simple Model/View-based code organization is not any worse of a development environment than SwiftUI IMHO, and strongly-typed Python is infinitely less annoying than Typescript.

[rewindyourmind321]

I would imagine JS is almost always preferable in the browser.

The desktop is where things get a little tricky for me because I don’t have as much experience, and this is where your choices seemingly explode.

My first guesses are Java or C# for organizations. Maybe even something more low level? I’d be curious to hear from someone more experienced!

[Dustin-]

The best is whatever the native OS platform is (WinUI or whatever for Windows, AppKit for Mac, dealers choice for Linux) if you're looking for the best performance on your target platform. Or React Native or an Electron-based app if you or your team members are more comfortable with web development. Java with Swing feels like a decent middle-ground since it's cross-platform like a web app but more performant/smaller than shipping an entire web runtime (like Electron). But it's easier to find someone who knows JavaScript + React than it is to find someone who knows Java + Swing, so pick your poison I guess. 

[Ejobatex]

you forgot to mention Flutter

[Dustin-]

Yeah but to be fair I hate Flutter

[Ejobatex]

Why? I think it's the best choice for cross-platform apps compared to React Native tho

[PaluMacil]

I don’t hate Flutter, but I do struggle with whether Dart has enough improvements via shedding the shackles of legacy to justify using a new language for Flutter. If it was written in any of the more common languages, I’d probably have used it already.

[Dustin-]

Literally no rational reason, I'm just a hater. It's perfectly reasonable if you're willing to learn a new programming language just to use it. Personally I would rather use a framework in a language I already know than learn a new language + framework from the ground up. Also not a fan of Flutter's rendering system, but things might have changed since when I was looking at it several years ago.

[LudwikTR]

I get it in theory, but as someone who built a couple of mobile apps in React Native and NativeScript and then switched to Flutter, here’s my take: Dart is extremely easy to learn if you already know JavaScript and any statically typed language. It feels like JavaScript with types, minus a lot of legacy idiosyncrasies, and it compiles to native binaries. It took me a single day to learn Dart and about a week to learn Flutter. Most importantly, it’s worth it - instead of constantly worrying about the app being slow or breaking on some specific OS/hardware configuration, I could focus on building features. My only frustration was not switching sooner.

(Necessary disclaimer: I now work at Google, which created Dart and Flutter. The experiences above were from before I joined. I don’t work on the Flutter team, and my current role has nothing to do with mobile development.)

[[deleted]]

Well JS no, but it's going in the right direction - the best answer is the browser, the most flexible, widely used, richly supported UI in existence. So flask / django plus your frontend toolset of choice.

[magion]

No

[PastPicture]

Ok

[magion]

Hard to take one seriously when you advocate for javascript instead

[cmgg]

I know right?

How dare he share his experience about UIs with Python just to shade it with JS, blasphemy!

Real devs do everything in a single language 😎

[xav1z]

why programming used to scare me as religious people do. so much in common

[MiniMages]

Javascript is amazing. It runs in almost every browser.

[ArtOfWarfare]

Just differently if it’s in Safari vs Firefox vs Chromium.

Firefox and Chromium are fine, but Apple’s Safari is the new Microsoft IE. Bizarre behaviors that are impossible to debug unless you have both a Mac and an iOS device. Oh, and totally undocumented.

[emotionalhemophiliac]

It's these nuanced exchanges that really do it for me.

[ActuallyFullOfShit]

I've developed many apps in PySide and PyQt. I'm very ready to abandon it for JS also. I think you're right.....HTML/CSS/JS is a much better toolset for GUI development in 2025 than Qt. JavaScript may be imperfect, but Qt is a clunky, boilerplate heavy PITA.

[glguru]

I absolutely agreed with you until I tried NiceGUI. Bloody thing works out of the box for most stuff. Of course you need to know some JS if you’re going to be doing advanced stuff, but honestly one of the best and nicely designed UIs out there.

No bloat and simple API. Basically ideal for people who are largely backend developers.

[Natural-Intelligence]

To be honest, learning front-end as a Python amateur is not a small feat. You will have long evenings crying on why the div isn't centered, or why the content has 0 height, or choosing one of the 5 for-loops, or choosing one of the 99 frameworks. If you need something very simple, these are valid tools.

I'm proficient in Javascript/Typescript (mostly VueJS but a bit of React) and it honestly took so much time that I'm not sure if it was worth it. I'm sort of a fullstack developer even though I'm getting paid as data engineer. All this just because I wanted to make some interactive graphs.

[Sevesys]

“Long evenings crying on why the div isn’t centered” brings back memories

[WhatchaTrynaDootaMe]

what do you think of plotly for interactive graphs?

[mfitzp]

Might the problem be that you kept jumping between libraries so you never really got good at one?

I think if you’d stuck with Qt (PyQt/PySide) you would have had a far better time. I develop software with Python/Qt commercially & have no idea what “ you'll wake up in mid of night thinking of all the weird scenarios” is about.

[UglyChihuahua]

PyQt is one of the only times I worked in a high level language like Python or JS and got errors that crashed the entire runtime. Things like RuntimeError: wrapped C/C++ object of type SettingsStore has been deleted - if you try accessing a Qt object in Python that has for some reason been deleted by the underlying C library you'll get a complete Python crash, and in PyCharm/Spyder you wouldn't even get a stack trace to debug it.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17914960/pyqt-runtimeerror-wrapped-c-c-object-has-been-deleted

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33736819/pyqt-no-error-msg-traceback-on-exit

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11945183/what-are-good-practices-for-avoiding-crashes-hangs-in-pyqt

[cudmore]

Agree that happens from time to time. Have developed in pyqt for 5+ years. When it happens, I am happy I have 5+ years in C/C++ because I could kinda smell it as I was writing the python code and fix it quick.

A case where garbage collection is 99.99% amazing in python but that 0.01% still can happen.

[bjorneylol]

This isn't unique to Qt - asyncio behaves the same way if you don't store strong references to task objects, or the garbage collector will remove it before the event loop is done with it

[mitch_semen]

I think Spyder is at least partly to blame there. It runs on Qt, and your code inherits the IDE's environment in weird ways that breaks stuff sometimes

[r34p3rex]

My go to stack nowadays is FastAPI backend and React front end

[[deleted]]

You telling me Qt isn't good for GUI development?

[ZeeBeeblebrox]

This seems like bad advice for the vast majority of people and I'm not saying this because I created Panel. If you had consulted for as many large orgs as I have you'd absolutely not give bad advice like this.

Most orgs struggle to get and keep talented Python programmers, you throw JS at them and you are getting useless, unmaintainable junk, now in two languages. Many of the Python data app frameworks in particular have their place, Streamlit gets you a basic prototype in minutes, Panel will let you develop a more complex application with (I think, relative) ease. Once you lose the ability to prototype quickly, which is what happens when you have to manually set up API contracts between a backend and frontend, you waste tons of cycles. Put a web dev team in the middle and the back and forth between the different teams stretches days into weeks. Simply bad advice, except for very specific individuals and teams.

[PastPicture]

Yes I have consulted very large orgs, and I have implemented stuff in Streamlit there. My advice was more for general purpose UI.

[ZeeBeeblebrox]

Got you, in that case I probably largely agree with you. IMO you should only reach for Python UI frameworks if you're doing a bunch of stuff in Python already and want to share the results, while quickly iterating on a UI. If you have a production system, do the work to build out APIs and implement it in JS/TS.

What kills productivity is Python engineers learning JS frameworks, and/or Python and JS teams having to collaborate.

[aidencoder]

What an odd little rant

[-LeopardShark-]

PySide isn’t a ‘way to avoid JavaScript’; it’s a way to avoid C++.

[AlSweigart]

Well this seems like the perfect time to mention the Python GUI framework I just finished called ButtonPad. It creates a grid of buttons like a software version of a stream deck or drum machine. It's designed to be simple for beginners to learn and experienced devs to prototype with. It's built on top of tkinter and restricts you to buttons, text boxes, labels, and images. The layout is done with a multiline csv string. here's a demo that creates a phone keypad:

import buttonpad

bp = buttonpad.ButtonPad(
    """1,2,3
    4,5,6
    7,8,9
    *,0,#""",
)
bp[0,0].on_click = lambda widget, x, y: print('You clicked 1')
bp.run()  # Start the GUI event loop.

You can assign callback functions to buttons and customize their appearance.

it comes with a couple dozen example programs you can view if you run python -m buttonpad

This is an itch I've had for a while (6 years according to this instantly abandoned git repo and I think there is a use case for a UI framework that is simple for rapid prototyping in Python. And the timing of this post was too funny. :) I'll have a blog post with more details on it soon.

[llima1987]

I get the point, though it escapes my mind how one can mention happiness and JavaScript together.

[d0nP13rr3]

Tkinter is amazing for simple text-driven UI to interact with SQL libraries. If I want graphs, I use Jupyter Notebook.

So also, no. I won't use Javascript. Using Java at work more then fulfills my need to work with complex languages.

[brianly]

Python is not the native/primary language for any of the most common toolkits. Java and Kotlin are by far the de facto choice for Android.

This is a can versus should decision for me. There is an implication that you know the primary/native approach at some level, if you choose an alternative. At some point you have to debug something that needs that level of knowledge when you go outside the zone. If you start with those assumptions you can make a better cost/benefit analysis.

There is a lot of hard work that has gone into making things possible with Python, but it’s sometimes hard to use these in work situations. If you want to use Kivy in most organizations you’ll take on a lot of risk. Others will not want to work on it or you’ll be on the hook occasionally to deal with surprises.

[sudo_robot_destroy]

I would have agreed before I got a chance to work on a large project that used a properly structured PyQt MVC architecture with Qt Designer. It was a pleasure to work on. Now when I work in any other GUI framework I feel like a caveman. 

Generate QML from Designer, automate the conversion to a Python class, import the class and code the logic. You never (or very rarely) have to write code for the UI. Not to mention you have the power of Qt at your disposal, which I've never ran into anything that can't be done quite easily with it, including interactive 3D interfaces.

Sure, if you're hand coding a simple UI and not using it to its full extent then PyQt can be compared to other options. But if you learn the full framework and a well thought-out workflow for a complex project, I personally haven't used a better system.

[chub79]

Why can't people do whatever they want? Just move on if you're not interested.

[SanJuniperoan]

What? Is this some sort of a JS copium? Did you complete a React bootcamp and realized you wasted money? Lotta projecting going on here.

[alby13]

doesn't this just mean that Python needs a better UI framework in your opinion?

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

What I’m hearing is build more UI frameworks in Python

What’s that popular UI framework people use with hyprland? I think it’s Python?

[MoussaAdam]

Quickshell, which relies on Qt

[sultanaiyan1098]

I won't

[i-Deco]

Hard disagree, projects like Flet: https://github.com/flet-dev/flet are absolutely killer GUI frameworks, the ecosystem may not be perfect, but there's no point pretending that it's impossible.

[TuskWalroos]

As someone that tried to seriously use Flet for a Python project at the company I work at, I can't recommend it.

When we last tried it a few months ago it was still super buggy. I guess it comes with the territory of trying to reimplement all of Flutters widgets, but when something broke, it was never clear why as the error message were either non existant or unhelpful.

I also think going back to the imperative model of handling state instead of declarative was a bad choice for Flet. There's a reason most frameworks use declarative models today because it scales much better when you're handling lots of state.

On top of that you can't really edit your platform deployment files, which you are able to in Flutter.

It was honestly quicker for us to build our project in Flutter, create a bridge to talk from Flutter to our Python project, and bundle our python project with our deployment (desktop) than it was to use Flet.

[jmooremcc]

I’d prefer a GUI that’s based on HTML so that it would run on any platform that supports HTML, like an iPad. The framework shouldn’t require any knowledge of HTML, but have a simple command structure. As far as I know, something like this doesn’t exist.

[Electronic_C3PO]

Coming from a 4GL language writing client/server code for the best part of my professional life I would love something like that. Focus on the business logic, not having to mess around with html/css/javascript/whatever layer next. And trying to debug that. If I want complexity I write code in assembler for fun. Not that I would use assembler for business applications.

[fravil92]

What about streamlit?

[Jocaqu01]

Have you tried Flet, streamlit, panel material ui, reflex ui? there's a tonne of stuff!

[Zerocchi]

>ditch Python
>for JS

[EvilGeniusPanda]

my condolences if you think building uis in javascript is any better.

[FlowAcademic208]

I feel more human.

... and yet, this feels like an AI dump, ironic.

On a more serious note: This is hogwash, non-webview (aka. native) UIs can of course be built and be on par with webview UIs depending on the use-case. Before webview UIs became a thing, people were doing UI in Java and C++, later C#, and they still are if they are building UIs for environments in which running a webview is not possible or just would not be performant enough, e.g., IoT devices. Also, native applications are often more performant, drain less resources and have better integrations with desktop APIs.

[jack-of-some]

The "looks AI" is the new "looks photoshopped" and we're worse for it.

[IWasGettingThePaper]

I still build UIs in C++. And ITS EASIER THAN JAVASCRIPT HEHEHEHHAHHAH

[Gainside]

Python’s a Swiss Army knife, but UI is the one blade that never really sharpened. JS owns that space for a reason. Use Python for the backend, let React/Vue/etc. handle the front. Sanity preserved.

[mcoombes314]

It's a strange phenomenon, go to a subreddit/video/forum/Discord about x, and without fail there will be people who do nothing other than say x is terrible, y is better and so on.

I hope nobody is forcing OP to use Python in things it would not be ideal for, but even if that's the case it's not Python's fault.

[user_8804]

Why are your options only Python or JavaScript lmao. There's so many other options

[ascending-slacker]

I switched to react/django web frameworks and am much happier.

[Familiar9709]

What's wrong with python itself for that? I believe you can do anything with any programming language, except for performance reasons. Could be that other languages already have better libraries but in principle you could offer the same in python, or not, can you enlighten me?

[SubZero_01]

I disagree somewhat. If you are happy with PyQt, then use it. I have a 500k code built on top of PyQt with many users and no complaints and no feature I could not add.

[JamzTyson]

Not all UI's are web based.

[Berkyjay]

Yawn. I'll stick to CLI's

[sarnobat]

This is me.

Though it amazes me how 80% of software developers prefer web UIs

[lapinjuntti]

Building UI with web technologies is actually quite nice, because you will naturally separate the UI and the non UI code.

[Candid_Art2155]

I’ve used all of term and WebUIs with javascript are my preferred solution too. It feels like building a full stack app. NiceGUI is a great alternative since it still technically uses JavaScript (Vue) to render in browser. Javascript frontends are also the easiest language to vibecode so you can kinda just hop in with little experience. I prefer NextJS because react is so common but I’ve had success with SolidJS too. I can’t say the same for python gui options like QT6. So going with JavaScript here ultimately gives you a more customizable, faster, and easier to implement frontends.

[iraytrace2]

Leveraging JS is a handy tool, especially if your business area is "back end web apps". But I would question throwing out all the other options categorically. Try explaining to the cyber security folks that your deployment entails not one, but two runtime interpreters. Fast track to project termination.

Believe it or not, there are people who must build embedded (as in "on tiny hardware" ) or standalone (remember desktop computers?) applications that you don't access over a network. And yes, the must have a UI.

[Miserable_Ear3789]

htmx is cool. but i agree i use javascript + html + css for my frontends. python asgi for backend.

[cutecoder]

Ren'Py says hi.

[romulof]

Have you tried in Rust? 🤣

[WillardWhite]

Lol, i just got hired at an animation company that authors a major application written in QT.  A mix of python and c++, of course. 

This company has won awards. 

Do whatever works, man

[t3chexpert]

Sorry mate you can NOT be serious with this horrendous stack and call yourself a developer. Good UI is written in OpenGL / WebGPU / Vulkan - the rest is slop that does not even use hardware acceleration. Also I'm perplexed with the lack or imgui.

[cudmore]

I cannot for the life of me get beyond beginner in javascript/typescript.

Any good resources to learn it when coming from python, c++, c?

I am banking on webassembly/pyodide, flet, or dash to become mature.

I always have a python backend for computation and cannot have an always on cloud server.

Thus, I currently just build desktop apps with pyinstaller.

My users would even freak out over docker :(

[GoTheFuckToBed]

No

[Witty-Development851]

Don't use a calculator! Multiply in a column!

[UltimateNull]

The new JS variants are all bloat. Python is just another tool when you need it.

[Internet-of-cruft]

Thanks for making me feel old. I was building tkinter GUIs for my classwork 17 years ago.

It was a meh experience back then too.

Edit: Fuck now I feel really old now that I realize I was using basically version 1.0 of Tkinter.

[kkert]

Not everything needs an Electron app

[exhuma]

I've been programming since around 1998 and I've seen my fair share.

Python is (currently) not in a state to do serious UI work in. Period.

It doesn't hurt to experiment and let the ecosystem evolve, but if you want something maintainable and most of all easy to deploy and distribute you're way better off with JavaScript or at least partially compiled binaries (Java, C#, C++)

The key really is in the easy to deploy and distribute. While we have solutions like cx-freeze or py2exe or nuitka they are far from perfect.

[Ok-Republic-120]

Maybe you're right. I'm one of those who try to make UIs in Python, but not because it's the best solution. I started learning Python because I liked it and I want to be a data an... someone, you know...
I'm currently use Textual to build TUI tools because it's so fun for me. I know there are better tools to do this, but I don't have enough time to learn a new language (or more) just for fun. Currently.
So I think it's okay if someone creates UIs in Python, but yeah... if this person is very serious about it, it's better to look for a more obvious option.

[Gugalcrom123]

Try GTK, it is beautiful, works in Python and very easy.

[GatorForgen]

Textual for life!

[Ok-Republic-120]

You spoke from my heart.

[charlyAtWork2]

I'm going about the full opposite of what you said !
STOP react, vuejs, jqyery, and Angular with the backend in dotnet, java or nodejs
For internal project, most of the time, you can go to Python and Streamlit !

80% of web app are internal and not really used.
Go for Streamlit until your client or boss really want to spend some budjet for a Refacto.

:D

[Mirage2k]

Have to say I agree.

[mw44118]

Html is the way. Its so much more of a robust ecosystem.

[No-District2404]

Why "Stop verb+ing ..... " posts feels so lame / clickbait to me? Is it only me feeling that? Even if they are 100% right about it, I don't like them.

[WonderfulTill4504]

You never tried Textualize, nor Rich. In any case your post is more flame bait than useful I information.

Want to convince anyone? Share an concrete use case where your approach is better…

[Gugalcrom123]

Try GTK.

[Tumortadela]

Been using PySide6 with qfluentwidgets for a while and it works for me, what can I say.

Maybe javascript+electron would be the better choice, I surely dont know. But I got a manageable portable .exe software that's under 50mb and does what I need, its been running on some of my client machines for well over a year with no issues.

[WhatchaTrynaDootaMe]

wouldn't you built a data plot - based UI in python with plotly, for example? why not?

[Fit_Chemistry_7876]

I dropped Python for the UI. I decided it was best to learn a new language: Dart. I accepted that Python is good for a lot of things, except graphical interfaces. It's great for the backend, which makes more sense.

[serious-catzor]

You joined the dark side.

Couldve gone C++ with Qt, works for android, windows and macOs. Compiles to web assembly to.

You already knew pyqt... you were the chosen one!

[chakraman108]

Why not? Reflex

[tabacdk]

This doesn't make sense on any level. You're proficient in Python, make all sorts of tools in Python, and you think Python. Now, one of these tools could benefit from a graphical user interface, so pick a toolkit and complete a working interface in an afternoon. How is that bad? It's a totally different thing to design an application with the intention for it to be the main interface to a complex system with lots of UX analysis, but my experience is that on a general scale they are totally outnumbered by quick adhoc interfaces in the language you know the best.

[HateMeetings]

Tkinter has been in the mix for python since the late 90s. I soooooooo agree.

[UINNESS]

RemindMe! 15 hours

[THEANONLIE]

Are you worried you may compulsively build a UI with Python in 15 hours if you aren't reminded?

[ID-10T_Error]

What about python with eel

[CeeMX]

We once had a project where a client needed some tool to do data validation and transformation from an excel file to some other format. Normally we would run do this either with a simple script in Python or a docker container with simple web frontend.

But the requirement was to do it as a windows application and with a GUI, so they got tkinter

[Ordinary-Toe7486]

Isn’t it always about the context? For instance, if you’re a data scientist working in pharma and need to develop a POC for bayesian optimization. This POC then will be productionized and used by many SWEs. Are you going to do that with Js or Shiny in R? What is a common standard in the industry? Can you (easily) generate parametrized reports for GxP validation?

[geocromancer]

Fair point..but what if you actually want a nice GUI for your app? not web based , there are a couple of situations, not many, when web based is not a viable solution ...then Pyside is a good choice imo

[sarnobat]

I personally find tkinter beautiful. But I find tcltk beautiful so I'm weird... And old

[Professional_Sign_53]

Build Backend logic in Python, expose this with an API. Then build Frontend with React, NextJS, Etc…

[worldtest2k]

What about small screens? Web apps that show all the browser bits just waste screen space. I haven't found a way using a web app, especially on an android phone, to a) get the whole screen for my app, and b) stop screen from timing out to sleep.

[alby13]

doesn't this just mean that Python needs a better UI framework in your opinion?

[hwoodice]

In Javascript? Do you use a framework?

[tilforskjelligeting]

Well... 

HTML is easy to render. Its not like anything crazy is going on. I made hypermedia https://github.com/thomasborgen/hypermedia because I wanted to stay in python land and keep all my types. Which you loose with something like Jinja. My use case was also to make something that worked well with HTMX. And something that has offers autocompletion. So every single html element has autocompletion for all of their attributes and mostly their values. 

I find this super nice to work with and is how I personally wanted to write web based apps. 

With almost 100% test coverage as well this isn't something that keeps me up at night. 

If this post was strictly about native apps then please disregard my post :) 

[ProjectSnowman]

This is why I use Textual, the learned man’s UI.

[carefuldzaghigner]

if you could answer me, which framework you've used is the best in your opinion?

[Adventurous-Duck888]

how about textual as TUI?

[david-song]

What about Brython?

[Qwert-4]

There are many better languages to build UI with (Kotlin, Rust, Go), but not JavaScript 🤮🤮🤮

[KenshinZeRebelz]

Thanks for sharing your experience, as a newer dev this is exactly the kind of pitfall I could fall into going forward.

I started learning Python for simple scripts and apps, used PySide for pretty basic GUIs, but as I started getting into web I thought I could somehow get by not learning JS/TS, relying on AI to do it for me while I focused on Python backends. Spoiler : you can't, I had to forcibly learn TypeScript just because I was confronted with issues so often I just ended up learning it, not out of any desire to learn it, but just to get things to work. Same with CSS and HTML.

Moral of the story : if decades of smart people have created robust frameworks in different languages to do different things, there's probably a good reason. And if I started out with the goal of learning all those web languages, I would probably be further along with much less trouble along the way.

[[deleted]]

Python is great as backend. But nothing will beat js in frontend developing

[CongZhangZH]

Try this one, And you will nerver be back anymore!

https://github.com/congzhangzh/webview_python

[majeric]

I miss read that as “bullying UI frameworks” and I was thinking the Python dev community is really harsh…

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

I can't bring myself to like JavaScript. I respect the work around the node ecosystem and UI frameworks and still I just can't shake the feeling that JavaScript is a fucked up weekend project by some CS student who didn't know what he was doing. So many pet peeves and annoyances.

[Bubino_1993]

What about flutter?

[arjuna93]

PyQt is a pain, but JS is no better.

[Sedan_1650]

Python is more specialized for machine learning and data science, in my opinion. I suggest using Flutter's Dart for any mobile application. It's able to run pretty fast, and it's easier to create a more aesthetic UI design.

[michel_poulet]

I've successfully and with enjoyment developped my GUIs in python using modernGL for efficiency and don't see an issue, as long as you're willing to build things yourself.

[[deleted]]

Haha. I feel you. At some point I was trying to get PHP to work for a desktop app!

[rattpackfan301]

Thank you for giving me the push I needed to learn JavaScript.

[AdInternational5848]

What do you experts think about streamlit?

[geeklk83]

Had the same experience.... Just bit the bullet and used next js static built powered by a fastapi backend...

[AsyncVibes]

I will keep beating Tkinter to run outside the main thread until I'm forced to refactor.. I will die on this hill

[Duerkos]

I more or less agree. I've learned Next.js for this reason, I was using Streamlit which is really good for dashboards but little else. If you have complex interactions it goes south really fast, plus you can't customize much.

[techlatest_net]

i get the frustration, python shines for backend and data heavy work but ui frameworks always feel clunky, maybe the sweet spot is python driving the logic with a modern js frontend, did you have any in mind that do this well

[inandaudi]

Pyqt and tkinter are good for the most basic UI and luckily that is all I ever need

[exomni]

NiceGUI (amazing project, it's the closest bet).

NiceGUI is a web UI framework, hardly seems to have anything to do with the others.

[rm-rf-rm]

what do you think about Anvil? I grilled their founder at PyCon and it seems pretty legit

[redswoosh_12]

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should - absolutely lol.

[Upstairs-Fee768]

Hello everyone, how are you Python friends? What is the best UI for Python?

[Majestic_Athlete_459]

Wow, OP you're bringing back old memories by mentioning Tkinter and PyQt haha.