GUI programming

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Fri, 29 Mar 2002 17:39:14 -0800, Umesh Persad <upersad at tstt.net.tt> spake:
> felds and buttons. I see there are many GUI toolkits
> available. I am wondering which one should I use
> (tkinter, wxpython?) that will be simple enough
> to get me up and running qiuckly. Also are there
> any examples that I can look at? 

  If you want A) ease of installation on all platforms, and B) a really
good book on the subject, there is only one serious choice: Tkinter.
It's the standard, it's easy to work with, and John Grayson's book
_Python and Tkinter Programming_ is superb.  I've run my Umbra game
<http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Umbra/> on every platform I could
get my hands on (Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, HP-UX, and Solaris), and
it just works (though I had to tweak the font sizes on Windows but not
on other platforms, I dunno why).

  If you're willing to accept some installation hassles on some
machines, PyQt is a superior GUI toolkit (Qt uses events and listeners,
which Qt call "signals" and "slots" just to be different, rather than
callbacks, and has better components), and the book _GUI Programming
with Python: QT Edition_ <http://www.opendocspublishing.com/pyqt/> seems
to be quite good so far (I'm still in the middle of reading it).

  wxPython has a handful of fanatical believers, but I was never able to
get it working on my Linux box, and the Mac and non-Linux Unix support
is basically nil.  I can't recommend it for serious use.

  The fourth option is PyGame <http://www.pygame.org/>, which is based
on SDL, is fairly portable and easy to install, and is nigh-perfect for
developing games in.  However, the documentation is not as good as it
should be, it has a fairly non-Pythonic interface, and it's not a good
general-purpose GUI solution.

  For your project in particular, you could get by just fine with
Tkinter, but you may want to take a look at PyGame.

> Also, if any one is familiar with Tkinter,
> how do I put up a window with a size
> that I want? Also how do I place a canvas
> on the window at a predefined size?

  Windows can be positioned with code like:
win.geometry("+%d+%d" % (x, y) )
  I'm sure there are other ways, but that's how I do it.  If you want to
resize it, use:
win.geometry("%dx%d+%d+%d" % (w, h, x, y) )

  Positioning a canvas, OTOH, I don't recall.  I know there are ways to
do absolute positioning, but I almost always use the packer or grid
layout managers.  I think this is covered in Grayson's book.

-- 
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"No one is safe.  We will print no letters to the editor.  We will give no
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is at war and will give the enemy nothing but battle." -TUG, v1n1