What Python GUI APIs Are Out There? [closed]
Here's a good list.
I've used Tkinter and wxPython. Tkinter is quite basic, and doesn't use native widgets. This means that Tkinter applications will look the same on any platform – this might sound appealing, but in practice, it means they look ugly on any platform :-/ Nevertheless, it's pretty easy to use. I found Thinking in Tkinter very helpful when I was learning, because I'd never done any GUI programming before. If things like frames and layout algorithms and buttons and bindings are familiar to you, though, you can skip that step.
You can augment Tkinter with Tix (but be warned, Tix doesn't play well with py2exe). Also check out Python Megawidgets, which builds some more advanced controls using the Tkinter basics.
Finally, Tkinter plays nice with the shell: you can start the interpreter, do things like 'import tkinter' 'tk = tkinter.Tk()' etc. and build your GUI interactively (and it will be responsive). (I think this doesn't work if you use IDLE, though)
wxPython is much better looking, and ships with a much greater range of controls. It's cross-platform (though it seems a bit finicky on my Mac) and uses native controls on each platform. It's a bit confusing, though. It also ships with a demo application that shows off most of its features, and provides a test-bed for you to experiment. Some specific thoughts on wxPython:
- There are three (?) different ways to lay widgets out. Ignore two of them; just use Sizers. And even then, you can do just about any layout using only BoxSizer and GridBagSizer.
- All wx widgets have IDs. You don't need to care what the IDs are, but in the old days (I think) you did need to know, so some old code will be littered with explicit ID assignments. And most demo code will have -1 everywhere as the ID parameter (despite the fact that the methods all have ID as a keyword parameter that defaults to -1 anyway).
- Make sure you get the standard wxWidgets docs as well as the wxPython Demo – you need them both.
- If you want to use wxPython with py2exe and you want it to look good on Windows XP, you need a bit of trickery in your setup.py. See here
PyQt is excellent if you have experience or interest in Qt.
http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/intro