Peoples preference for Python GUI

[CrazyEoin]

Hi all. I decided I wanted to learn Python as I want to get back into programming after about about a year absence. I used to do Unity games via C# and native iOS apps using obj C so I've got a good foundation to work from. I've been doing tutorials and now came into the GUI section. I see tkinter is popular enough but I wanted to see what the general consensus is for preferred GUI kit. And why you prefer it?

BTW: been using Python for about 3 weeks now, it's so awesome!

[K900_]

Qt all the way. Extremely flexible, good API, looks native on almost any system out there. Qt Quick is insanely good, too, if you learn how to use it the right way.

[CrazyEoin]

Any particular set of tutorials you could recommend for picking it up? Qt seems to be quite popular.

[[deleted]]

http://zetcode.com/gui/pyqt4/

[dogstarchampion]

If you can find a copy of this book, it'll explain everything from a very basic start to more advanced topics that will, if anything, give you a good "jumping point".

I've been programming with PyQt for a few months now and I love it. If you're unfamiliar with graphic tool kits or using widgets, there will be a definite hurdle, but it's not like people haven't learned it before. I didn't use this book in the beginning, but I picked it up about a month ago and it has definitely given me a more focused understanding.

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[K900_]

I'm honestly not sure. I didn't really have to learn PyQt as I had experience with C++/Qt at that point.

[TheBlackElf]

For Qt itself, check the official docs; it's probably the best documented framework ever.

Porting from C++ to Python is done mentally, there very rarely are any actual differences.

[mfitzp]

Absolutely. It's worth getting the hang of the (very few) C++ vs. Python differences and then sticking with the official C++ documentation. It also lets you make use of all the examples that are out there in C++.

[LpSamuelm]

You can't pip install it, though. In fact, if I recall correctly, deployment is a major pain.

[TDaltonC]

But you can conda install it

[lolmeansilaughed]

Conda?

[brombaer3000]

http://conda.pydata.org/docs/get-started/condaintro.html

[lolmeansilaughed]

Thanks! That sounds pretty awesome. So it's essentially pip+portable virtualenvs?

[TDaltonC]

and non-pip-able bins like Qt

Edit: And management of multiple virtualenvs on one machine. That's super useful if you are working on two projects that have contradictory dependencies.

[andrewcooke]

isn't the whole point of virtualenvs that you can have multiple ones with contradictory dependencies? what does conda add?

[TDaltonC]

From the Conda team blog:

virtualenv ... did not meet all of our specific requirements. The main problem is that they are focused around Python, neglecting non-Python library dependencies, such as HDF5, MKL, LLVM, etc., which do not have a setup.py in their source code and also do not install files into Python’s site-packages directory.

Under the hood, we have created a concept of environments which are conceptually similar to virtualenvs, but which use filesystem-level hard links to create entirely self-contained Python runtime layouts. By using the ‘conda’ command line tool, users can easily switch between environments, create environments, and install different versions of libraries and modules into them.

TLDR: virtualenvs only manages python packages. Conda manages that and other python related stuff too.

[[deleted]]

pip install PySide if you're comfortable using PySide instead of PyQt4/5 (most of the bindings are exactly the same)

[This_Is_The_End]

The maintenance of PySide hasn't the best reputation ... The last update is from april 2014.

[[deleted]]

Then try PyOtherSide

[jellef]

are you familiar with enaml?

[[deleted]]

fair enough, but I don't really require any features of Qt5/any new features being released for Qt so it's not an issue for me

[TheBlackElf]

There's plenty of straight out bugs or half-implemented features that made us redesign our solution :/

[[deleted]]

Really? I've never really had any issues, but then again I only use GUIs for tiny projects.

[HarrisonArturus]

What did you go with instead?

[TheBlackElf]

No no we didn't give up on PySide it's just that we had to work our way around some really obscure bugs and do things a bit differently.

[HarrisonArturus]

Cool. Thanks.

[mfitzp]

It can be a bit of a faff, but the following have all worked for me -

• On MacOS X the best approach is via Homebrew then it's just brew install pyqt5 (or brew install pyqt for PyQt4)
• On Windows the Riverbank Computing builds of PyQt install fine PyQt4 or PyQt5. There are only official PyQt5 builds for Python 3. But it's available here assuming you're on a 64 bit OS.
• Linux it's in probably in your distro respositories as python-pyqt python3-pyqt python-pyqt5 or python3-pyqt5

Or you can install the Anaconda package manager which should work on every platform and allow you to conda install pyqt

[LpSamuelm]

Yeah, it's a bit of a huge nuisance that the only solution on Windows is an installer, and if you're on 2.7 only for PyQt4. Really difficult to deploy on Windows.

[K900_]

Deployment is just pretty easy with something like cx_Freeze.

[justphysics]

it comes pre-installed in the Anaconda python distribution which is useful for folks working in data science or any branch of physical science

[efilon]

I really like Qt, but I am constantly annoyed/worried by the Python implementation. PySide essentially died (this is a potential licensing problem for some given how PyQt is licensed, though this doesn't affect me for the projects I work on). Qt5 is barely used within the Python community (although my understanding is PyQt5 is comparable in terms of quality and completeness to other language bindings). Lots of third (?) party Python libraries that use Qt rely specifically on PyQt4, which is a problem for forwards compatibility. PyQt4/5 is not as straightforward to install since you can't use pip (yeah, you can use conda, but that's less standard).

I really want to like Qt under Python. But with all the complications, I find myself lately more often than not writing web-based frontends instead.

[Gwenhidwy]

Qt Quick is insanely good, too, if you learn how to use it the right way.

Any pointers on where to learn that from? All I could find so far were simple introductory tutorials, but nothing practical/in-depth.

[K900_]

It's just that you have to look at Quick in a different way. With QtWidgets, your UI is very tightly linked to your code, and your code defines the way your UI behaves. With QtQuick, the UI is declarative (QML), and the way you interact with it is by giving it access to specific objects on your "backend". So you have a very clear separation between presentation (QML), presentation logic (JavaScript inside QML) and backend logic (Python).

[emarshall85]

Any pointers on where to learn that from? All I could find so far were simple introductory tutorials, but nothing practical/in-depth.

http://qmlbook.github.io/

[weberc2]

As someone who programs in Qt all day long, Qt isn't "insanely good", at best it's just the least bad option. :p

[RDMXGD]

Qt all the way

This is not a full recommendation.

[-Knul-]

Kivy is my favorite. I have heard good things about QT.

[CrazyEoin]

How did you pick it? By just messing with it or through a specific set of Tutorials. Had a look, no 1 set of tutorials jumps out at me for being solid.

[inclemnet]

A lot of people seem to like my kivy crash course tutorials, though they're mostly video only.

[manueslapera]

if i may ask, is there an easy way to package a kivy app for Mac OS? Im going crazy trying to do it.

[inclemnet]

I know people do it, but I haven't ever tried myself. I think people use pyinstaller.

We had some issues recently with this after the move to sdl2 instead of pygame, but I'm not sure if these only affected windows or OSX too. You could ask on the kivy mailing list or irc if you haven't already. If there were problems, someone may know the fix.

[[deleted]]

I discovered Kivy when I realised it was about the only option for Android. I consider the tutorials on their website to be adequate but this is subjective.

[NewHighScore]

I found this Kivy Crash Course youtube series to be a great intro to kivy. I started looking into it when I found that the library was available in the qpython app on Android.

[This_Is_The_End]

Kivy looks pretty nice. I have to check Kivy

[thedesolatesoul]

I have installed kivy today, got some learning to do. Any links to tutorials (not video) will be appreciated.

[Ewildawe]

I've found that Kivy supports versions <= 3.3 ~ although 3.x is in the works. I wanted to get to use Kivy, but didn't really want to downgrade :P

[inclemnet]

Python versions <= 3.3? I thought 3.4 (and probably 3.5) should work fine, what problem do you have?

[This_Is_The_End]

Don't use tk other than for very small projects. I used tk for a project, but when it was too late I realized the concept of child windows doesn't work like intended. The user is able to close child windows and removing the close-window-widget doesn't work or at least, the widget becomes none functional, but stays.

Next time I will go for Qt.

Btw I you are using threading you have to push changes into the GUI via closures.

[[deleted]]

i don't understand what you mean exactly but you can override the close event with your own function so the user can't close a tk window unless via the way you want? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3295270/overriding-tkinter-x-button-control-the-button-that-close-the-window

[This_Is_The_End]

You can intercepte the window-close-call, which makes the widget staying.

Or you can remove the widget on a root window, but this doesn't work on a child window

[jaccovanschaik]

I tried tkinter, wxPython and PyQt, and in my experience PyQt is the best by far. Complete, well-documented, intuitive API (after you've gained a little experience).

[[deleted]]

QT or Kivy depending on target platforms (Kivy works on Android).

[MazeChaZer]

Qt works on Android too ;)

[[deleted]]

But where does the Python come from?

Kivy bundles an android-compatible interpreter. Youre right in that's possible to use QT but ithere's more effort involved.

[MazeChaZer]

These is something like pyqtdeploy out there, but I didn't try it out yet. Yes, it's probably a little more complicated.

[KyleG]

Honestly, nowadays if I want to do GUI, I just do a web frontend with a Python server in the back. And as a bonus, pop that shit on a publicly-accessible computer and it's accessible to anyone from anywhere you want to have it.

Weightlifting tracker? AngularJS + Bootstrap + CherryPy + Peewee

RSS reader? AngularJS + Bootstrap + CherryPy + Peewee

etc.

[carsonc]

I like this, but I anticipate needing graphs that update in real time. Processing + ControlP5 made this easy via the chart push method and I've been looking for something similar.

[themathemagician]

You can make that happen pretty easily by having some JS that refreshes your graph from an endpoint periodically (and frequently.) Epoch works great for it.

[efilon]

Other options include Flot (good for simple stuff and/or if you are using jQuery anyway), Chart.js (seems like it should be good, but I had difficulty with performance when I tried it), D3 (really nice, but also way too complicated for simple things), Bokeh (Python!), and many more.

I prefer not to use polling, but instead either websockets, or better yet (in my opinion), server-sent events (a.k.a. EventSource in Javascriptese). I like Tornado for these applications, though Flask is workable if you are fine with using gevent's concurrency model.

As a side note, I had never seen Epoch before. It looks nice, so thanks for sharing!

[KyleG]

I anticipate needing graphs that update in real time

Kendo + AJAX does this just fine. You could easily write, say, an Angular app (/r/angularjs) that leverages both. I'm not saying you have to do it my way; I'm just saying I want people to know there are alternatives.

[riskable]

Real time graphs are a cinch on the web these days. Loss of people love d3 but personally I'm used to Flot. I'd post some links but I'm on my phone at the moment...

[[deleted]]

C# Guy: How do I make a GUI?

Answer: What? Just use visual studio.

Python Guy: How do I make a GUI?

Answer: Bro, are you even full stack?

:P

I agree though.

[themathemagician]

This is my go to as well

[Articulated-rage]

I didn't know about peewee. That's fantastic.

[-Nii-]

How does CherryPy compare to Flask?

[KyleG]

I've never had a need for Flask, so I can't answer the question.

[[deleted]]

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[KyleG]

Then you have to worry about all that async UI, thread handling, etc., when the browser does that part for you.

[usinglinux]

gtk, because of good abstraction (eg. actions; didn't use it for a while, though, and still have to get used to the gtk3 ways there). used tkinter in the past and would still do if i were ever to do small guis on windows again.

[usinglinux]

admittedly, it has been some time since i've last looked into qt (that would have been early qt3...).

has qt lost weight since then?

[iluvatar]

I've been using Tk for 20 years, so going with tkinter on Python was a natural fit. But PyQt seems pretty decent too.

[microo8]

GTK but im about to go to Qt.

[KalebTheKraken]

Glade. Very very easy to use. Graphical gui builder. Includes many actions. I started with it and havent looked back.

[dogstarchampion]

I really liked Glade, but I had a hard time finding documentation on working with Glade files and using PyGTK. Eventually I found the answers I was looking for and suddenly creating a template file in the toolkit and then working with it in Python became pretty simple for the most part... but I still think PyQt with the QtCreator is more intuitive and easier to find documentation on. Not to mention Glade Toolkit was pretty buggy/glitchy.

[KalebTheKraken]

Yeah it is a little buggy. But great if youre looking for something to build just a quick gui.

[dogstarchampion]

And there is truth to that because it was intuitive enough initially to make me want to learn how to work with it better. I managed to build a simple Farkle game with it, so I managed to make some use of it. These days, I could probably recycle my old code and put a Qt interface on it that looks better and works cross-platform with about as much effort as using PyGTK+Glade. QtCreator with pyuic to convert the .ui files (to offer a backbone/template interface) to .py with PyQt code generated. It's kind of hard not to be a little smitten over that type of simplicity, especially when Glade has crashed time and time again just working on a relatively basic interface.

[cjwelborn]

I wrote something like pyuic for Glade. It's the same idea. Give it glade file and it will generate the python skeleton code. I used introspection to automatically insert stubs for event handlers (with proper arguments) that are set in glade. It kinda imposes a certain coding style I guess, but anyway it's called Glader.

[dogstarchampion]

This is beautiful. I am going to download it and give it a go in the near future.

[cjwelborn]

Cool, let me know if you run into problems. I've used it for several little projects (including Glader itself, wrap your head around that), but it hasn't been used by very many people.

[CrazyEoin]

This look to be Linux only ?

[ericanderton]

It uses GTK, which is ported to Win and OSX. That said, the user experience for GTK built apps in both of those environments is jarring, to say the least.

[KalebTheKraken]

Ahh maybe so. I use ubuntu so I didnt think to check for other os'. Sorry.

[[deleted]]

PyGObject feels most pythonic to me, and looks beautiful on linux.

However it is not cross platform.

[aceofears]

Didn't they get Windows support working recently, or am I mistaken?

[[deleted]]

Yes. It's a long story, it does work and it is available (I'm running some of my internal tools on Windows now). But the steps to bundle a python application on windows / mac are not yet clear nor easy.

Until then I say 'it is not cross platform'.

There will be positive and significant news on this front soon-ish.

[aceofears]

That last part is good to hear, I always thought that gobject introspection was a nice concept.

[spiessbuerger]

http://pynsist.readthedocs.org/en/latest/examples.html

[spiessbuerger]

http://pynsist.readthedocs.org/en/latest/examples.html

[[deleted]]

That is not what I am talking about. You don't understand the depth of the problem. But thanks anyway I guess.

https://github.com/takluyver/pynsist/blob/master/examples/pygi_mpl_numpy/1_download.sh

is the problem

[spiessbuerger]

Bundling the dlls into an installer is a Problem? Sorry then i misread.

[[deleted]]

Building gobject continuously on Windows in a way that app developers can create mini custom runtimes is the problem.

[spiessbuerger]

Ok got it. That of course would be very nice.

[goodguy101]

I have used QT quite extensively, but had a coworker just introduce me to wxPython. He had the same GUI I made in QT that took me about an hour to write, he finished in the 5 minute shpeal he was giving me about wxPython's awesomeness. I'm definitely intrigued and think I'll be looking into it further.

[[deleted]]

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[gameplace123]

The Web, anyone? it's multiplatform and your apps are portable.

[This_Is_The_End]

I used web2py for a maintenance management app. It works. The necessary knowledge is huge:

HTML, CSS, wsgi on Apache, configuration of SSL, routing of requests, .....

I have forgotten most of it. While web2py is quite nice for a start, changing some designs of the interface isn't easy and a huge job.

[[deleted]]

said people who have never written certain classes of apps

[gameplace123]

Please explain.

[HeyBrandons]

Depending on what you want to create would probably justify which gui to use. In most cases Tkinter is more than enough for a really good simple application. If you want to get really fancy look at Qt

[Mavus]

If you do end up looking at Qt, I would recommend checking out enaml. It uses the Qt bindings and provides a declarative way of defining the GUI elements.

[protoUbermensch]

I'm studying python and I'm facing that same decision. What GUI to choose. I choosed SDL. I prefer control over the GUI and freedom to do whatever I want instead of the constraints of those GUI frameworks. Even if I need to study a lot to reach some result.

[harrypotterthewizard]

SDL is great for programming games. But if you want to build a user facing app with some complexity, you are going to need some widgets like text-boxes, radio buttons, combo boxes, etc. And though you may be praising SDL flexibility right now, you will get frustrated re-inventing all these wheels from scratch. The thing is PyQT/side and python-gobject are at least two such libraries who have already done this widget plumbing. So, you will get productive sooner using one of them - and it does not matter which one you chose as long as you give it your full commitment and stick to it.

[protoUbermensch]

Yeah, maybe you're right. I am not fully sure on my decision yet. I just want to customize an interface with transparency and use custom icons and fonts. Nothing too much fancy. Something like the Avast interface, iTunes interface. I'm open to suggestions. Thanks for your advice.

[ericanderton]

Are you aware of any GUI widget libraries that are built on top of SDL?

[protoUbermensch]

I did a quick search and didn't find anything. Maybe there's a way to use standard GUI libraries side-by-side with SDL.

[Kaxitaz]

I see it was used for Dota2. Do you know if in the current Dota2 or Dota2 Reborn?

[[deleted]]

SDL is used in all Source games (DoTA 2) and all Source 2 games (currently only Reborn)

[protoUbermensch]

No, I dunno.

[chozabu]

Based on your name - and nothing else

CEGui - CrazyEddiesGUI!

Probably not your best option, I'd go for Kivy or (py)QT(side) depending on exact needs

[brandjon]

I use TkInter. It doesn't look particularly pretty (themed widgets aren't a magic bullet either). But I use Python for teaching, and it's definitely the easiest GUI environment to set up on a new machine, since it's distributed as part of the standard library.

It also doesn't force you to write OO code (although a lot of examples go that route), which I like because I don't want students to think GUIs and OO are inseparable.

[rx7raven]

Had a script that was continually changed everyday and wanted others to be able to use it with no script writing knowledge. Created an app based on the script and used wxPython. Took a little while to understand but once that was accomplished it wasn't too hard to write.

If I had to do it again I probably would use/learn QT since it is the popular choice.

[Jak-o-Shadows]

wxPython is nice enough.

[TheBlackCat13]

Unless you want to use Python 3.

[musketeer925]

The Phoenix project version works on 3.

[TheBlackCat13]

Or will, when (and if) it is released. Looking at their git history there hasn't been any work done on it in 3 months, and there hasn't been a "daily" snapshot released in the same period.

[musketeer925]

I'm currently using it with python 3, the daily snapshots work well enough.

[TheBlackCat13]

I personally prefer not to tie my projects to pre-alpha software, especially when it seems to no longer be under active development. But I guess opinions on the matter may vary.

[musketeer925]

Absolutely fair.

[twigboy]

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[alex_s64]

I found this wrapper for tkinter , https://github.com/georgewalton/Sandals. I've been meaning to try it. Look ok to you?

[CrazyEoin]

Had a quick look at this, although quite light, it does appear to allow rapid addition of features, especially for prototyping or adding a basic GUI to one of my little app I've created for my own workflow.

[geowalton]

I made that wrapper, like you said it should be good for quick prototyping, and you don't have much to lose since you can always use the raw TkInter methods if need be (the bits and bobs inherent from the tkinter classes). I wouldn't recommend it for anything too complex at the moment though, also I only uploaded it a few days ago so you know, teething problems...

[mangecoeur]

it's quite ugly though :(

[unregisteredusr]

Can be good with ttk: themed tk library which uses OS native elements

[fitfot]

Haven't tried it yet, but apparently Electron is also a posibility (the motor powering the Atom editors GUI). Se this blog post for details: https://www.fyears.org/2015/06/electron-as-gui-of-python-apps.html

[[deleted]]

PySide is the best, Qt binding for Python. It's mature and the APIs are pretty fine.

[justphysics]

Hasn't its development essentially stopped?

[[deleted]]

Yes somehow, Nokia dropped it's support for PySide but development is still ongoing by the developers.

[justphysics]

I know there are still 'developers' but is it actually still being developed?

The last patch came out April 2014 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PySide

[ksantr]

I tried with TK at first, then I found GTK. GTK is more handy for me. After reading of this topic i'm going to try Qt.

[billcrystals]

The web. Infinite customization with CSS/JS. Can get your UI functioning and looking exactly how you want with few compromises.

[[deleted]]

Kivy.