[Python-3000] Python-3000 Digest, Vol 18, Issue 116

[Talin]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> john.m.camara at comcast.net writes:
> 
>  > Python can't include all the major packages but it is necessary for any 
>  > language to support a good GUI package in order to be widely adopted 
>  > by the masses.  [...]  My vote would 
>  > be for wxPython but I'm not someone who truly cares much about GUIs 
>  > as I much prefer to write the back ends of systems and stay far away from 
>  > the front ends.
> 
> My experience with wxPython on Mac OS X using the MacPorts (formerly
> DarwinPorts) distribution has been somewhat annoying.  wxPython seems
> to be closely bound to wxWindows, which in turn has a raft of
> dependencies making upgrades delicate.  It also seems to be quite
> heavy compared to the more specialized GUIs like PyGTK and PyQt.

Part of the problem is that all GUI toolkits today are heavy, because 
the set of standard widgets that a GUI toolkit is expected to support 
has grown enormously. A typical UI programmer today would be very 
disappointed in a toolkit that didn't support, say, multi-column grids, 
dynamic layout, tabbed dialogs, toolbars, static HTML rendering, and so 
on. I myself generally won't bother with a GUI toolkit that doesn't have 
draggable tabbed document windows, since I tend to design apps that use 
that style of document management.

I know that Greg Ewing was working on a "minimal" python GUI 
(http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python_gui/), but it hasn't 
been updated in over a year. And I'm not sure that a minimal toolkit is 
really all that useful. Even if you restricted it to only those things 
needed to write IDLE, that still means you have to have a text editor 
widget which is itself a major component.

But I sure would like a completely "Pythonic" GUI that supported all of 
the features that I need.

-- Talin