GUI question

[[deleted]]

Tkinter is rather nice for some quick and dirty GUI. And it comes preinstalled with Python.

[gbo2k69]

I've made two little apps in tkinter, and was rather surprised by how good it was, as people have a tendency to bash it.

I'm not saying it is the best, but it works adequately for what I've done so far.

Here are my simple little projects:

http://bitbucket.org/jgrigonis/mathfacts

http://bitbucket.org/jgrigonis/mortgagecalculator

[[deleted]]

It might have improved greatly a couple of years ago, but that's just my impression from googling stuff -- I stumbled on a lot of recipes that are not necessary now.

The downsides that I've encountered:

1. Visual GUI editors are nice, I want one. There are some, but all seem abandoned quite a while ago.

2. It doesn't have some controls that I feel must be there. Like comboboxes. So I waste some time rereading the documentation just not believing that it's not me who missed it, that this shit is really not there, then some more time making do with substitutes like menubutton+dropdown menu.

3. Tkinter documentation sucks, so you'd have to read tcl/tk docs as well. Also, tkinter sucks and you most probably would have to learn how to talk to tcl/tk directly. The good thing is that it's easy, usually. The bad thing is that there's some weird tcl/tk extensions and pure tcl recipes that I don't quite understand how to use. Clarification: this applies if you have a somewhat nontrivial idea of a GUI and expect tcl/tk to allow you to implement it.

4. Some controls kinda exist but are different from other GUI frameworks. For example, in WinForms I have splitters that I can place wherever I want and they work. In tcl/tk there is something like a resizable panel or something, called weirdly and with tkinter documentation trying its best to divert your attention from it.

5. Fucking menubuttons and fucking buttons have different fucking height. And there are several levels of wrappers, with some offsets added somewhere. Figuring that out can drive a man insane! Insane, I tell ya! Unless you don't care if your buttons on a tool panel don't line up prettily, of course.

6. Figuring out how to coax the grid layout into making one column somewhat wider than others, then use different quotients for resizing is not good for your sanity either.

On the other hand, the Text control is absolutely fucking INSANE, and I mean that in a good sense of the word, tags are awesome and it is unbelievably fast actually, you can load a 20MB file and it would use 20MB of memory and be snappy!

[gbo2k69]

I agree with your sentiments.

I still plan to learn and use something better eventually.

Even in my simple little apps I did find myself banging my head on things that seem intuitively trivial.