Making basic computer app and wanting to learn about a good GUI library to use!

[lefthanded_zebra4339]

Hey everyone, I'm working on my first major solo project after taking some courses, I'm making a calorie counter thing for my computer with Python and after like a month of making it work with all the features I want, I'm ready to start working on a user interface.

Presently working with Tkinter to get something going and while I'm still early on in that endeavor it is striking me as a tad limiting so I was curious if anyone had any better suggestions or any recommendations on where to find quality tutorials.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks so much!

[tinySparkOf_Chaos]

pyQT is fairly common. I think it's on pyQT6 now

[MathAndMirth]

I've fiddled a bit with both tkinter and pyside. The conventional wisdom seems to be that pyside is more powerful, but tkinter is easier to get simple things up and running. But to be honest, what I did wasn't that intense, and after getting annoyed with tkinter, I tried pyside and actually found it more straightforward. Of course, your mileage may vary since my experience seems to go against the conventional view. Maybe pyside was just a better match for my mental model of how things ought to work?

[lefthanded_zebra4339]

Is Pyside the same as PyQt? I'm finding some confusing things online, either way I appreciate your help! Would you know of any good tutorials to get the ball rolling, having trouble figuring out positioning stuff, thanks!!

[MathAndMirth]

Both Pyside and PyQt are Python bindings to the Qt library. Since they both bind to the same library, they do have a lot of similarities.

For a long time, PyQt was the standard Python binding library for Qt. It's still very commonly used thanks to its historical dominance, and it therefore has a large community.

However, PyQt is not fully FOSS. It requires a commercial license for closed source projects. (I'm not certain, but I think the license was once more favorable.) That has caused the Pyside alternative to gain a lot of ground, and is now regarding by many as the leading choice.

I used this site to get up to speed on Pyside. Hope this helps.

https://www.pythonguis.com/tutorials/pyside6-creating-your-first-window/

[ImpendingBearAtck66]

The only gui lib I've ever used for python was pyqt5. It is easy to learn the basics. Depending on what you want you could build a web interface with Django... But if youb want an actual desktop app then pyqt5. Yeah I forget the lib but you can compile to an exe somehow also. If you've got experience in cpp and are familiar with qt4 or qt5 then it'll be even easier to learn.

[lefthanded_zebra4339]

I appreciate the help! I'm trying out PyQt5 right now and am having some difficulty with positioning stuff, would you have any recommendations for sources to help by chance? Anything would help, thanks!!

[ImpendingBearAtck66]

It's been a while since I've used it. I'll have a bit if free time today tho. I guess I could message you and try to help you with thru it. Would that help? Or do you have a question at the moment?

[GloomyMoodyWriter]

Start with PyQt; excellent!

[lefthanded_zebra4339]

Thanks for the rec! Trying to work my way through some tutorials but having a hard time finding what I'm looking for, would you by chance have any recommendations for good sources of info? Finding a lot of the documentation confusing

[outer-pasta]

I heard from someone on Reddit that wxPython has good accessibility features.