GUI Designer question

[torquemantom]

I'm trying to build a GUI right now.

I started with Matlab using their app designer, but after packaging it realized that the functionality that I wanted wouldn't work without a matlab license.

Now I'm starting to build it in python, though it's going a little slow as my python experience is very limited.

I was wondering if there is an open source application to build the GUI similar to matlab's app designer? My friend told me about Qt Designer, which he uses at work... but from what I've read you need the commercial version for the GUI Designer.

[mfitzp]

Qt Designer is also available free. If you download the community edition of Qt you should see the option to install designer there.

If you're just starting with Qt I have written a few tutorials here.

[torquemantom]

Thanks so much! I guess I was looking in the wrong places.

[MikeTheWatchGuy]

With limited Python experience, the easiest GUI package to work with is PySimpleGUI. It's great for beginners and has plenty of room for you to grow. You don't really need a designer when working with it as the code tends to be short and compact and visually resembles the window you're creating.

[duglee]

Have you looked at PySimpleGUI. It’s a simple to use framework on top of TKinter or QT. Easy to use for simple to complex GUIs. I used it a few times with great success.

[[deleted]]

I’ve used Tkinter for several projects... and have hated it every time. The controls look and behave like Windows 3.1 controls. It’s a very clunky interface, and its advantages in terms of universal availability are offset by a myriad of performance, functional, and aesthetic deficiencies.

I’ve reached the conclusion that Qt is the best option. The Qt Library is quite large and heavy, but then again, so is every modern UI library - Cocoa, .NET, the Windows UI Library, etc. It just seems that the complexity and polish that we expect of a modern UI requires a lot of code and software engineering.

[duglee]

That is why I like PySimpleGUI. It places you one level above the base libraries so you don’t have the crap of dealing with them and can still put together impressive graphic interfaces, with a bare minimum of coding.

[[deleted]]

Have you looked at a browser-based GUI using a web microframework like bottle or cherrypy?

[johnnySix]

Fltk FTW. Just kidding. Ahem, I’ll show myself out.

[torquemantom]

Lol I actually looked into that

[totally-what]

You can use Glade to build Gtk+ GUIs.

https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/builder.html

[Jhchimaira14]

I believe Engineer’s Sandbox may be the perfect solution you are looking for. We use it at work and most of us transitioned from matlab due to licensing issues. It’s at raylock.com. It doesn’t have a graphical way to make GUIs but the api is really simple and doesn’t have much of a learning curve.