Tk vs wxPython ?

[Andrew Dalke]

Aurélien Géron:
> - the documentation is half Tk and half python which makes it confusing

Well, I find the wxPython documentation pretty confusing myself.
The Qt documentation is much easier to use.  For example, suppose
I'm looking at the wxListBar documention to find out how to select
an item programmatically.  It's not on that page - I need to look at the
list of base classes, guess that it's in wxControlWithItems and look at
that documentation.  Qt's docs include a list of all methods available
from a given widget.  I also like Qt's cross references to code, inclusion
of how the widgets look, and that the HTML docs for a widget are
in a URL ending with the same name (I have Konqueror set up so that
"qt:XYZ" expands to "/path/to/qt/docs/qtXYZ.html", so I can quickly
pull up the docs for the widget.)

Or, for example, see the "wxGrid classes overview" which has sections
with content "Yet to be written."

> So I looked for a better way and behold: I found wxPython.  In comparison,
> it truly ROCKS !

I've only dabbled in Qt and wxPython, but so far I've found Qt easier
to use.  The API also seems a bit more stable - I've known people who
used wxWindows a couple years ago, and things like the table widget
kept changing enough that they decided to write their own interface
layer to that widget.

That may have stabilized since then.

> I'm sure beginners would come to love Python even faster if they could
truly
> create their first GUI in minutes.  I'm voting for wxPython to replace Tk
in
> the future Python distribution.
>
> Any comments on this ? Anyone else want to vote ?

I also found Qt's Designer easier to use than Boa Constructor or the
XML-based
one which comes with wxPython.  In no small part because Qt includes a
nice tutorial describing how to write a simple application.  With Boa
Constructor,
I couldn't figure out how to say "put a spacer between these two objects".
I
gave up and just wrote the code myself, using an empty text widget, but even
then my layout doesn't work correctly on resizes, and I don't yet know why.

Then again, I don't use Tkinter, so changing to another default GUI doesn't
really affect me.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com