Tkinter, wxPython, PyGtk, or PyQt...

Andreas Held a.held at computer.org
Mon Oct 13 08:30:34 EDT 2003


For a light-weight and cross-platform alternative to Tkinter and
all the others you might want to look at pyFLTK at http://pyfltk.sourceforge.net.
Of course I am a little bit biased as I am the maintainer of pyFLTK.

Andreas Held

Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<B8gib.205300$hE5.6905514 at news1.tin.it>...
> carljohan.rehn at chello.se wrote:
> 
> > I would like like to start doing some GUI-programming in Python, but don't
> > know which library to choose.
> > 
> > Tkinter seems a bit old. Correct me if I am wrong! The layout doesn't look
> > as nice as for the others.
> 
> Yes, it's old (and others have expressed doubts about its looks).  F. Lundh
> is preparing a revamped version but I don't much about it.
> 
> 
> > wxPython seems to be the first-hand choice for people doing
> > W32-programming (with MFC-experience).
> 
> If win32 is your target and mfc your experience, pythonwin may be
> what you want.  wxPython is, however, cross-platform.
> 
> > PyGtk seems to be a modern, very clean and nice approach, but with poor
> > W32-support. Is PyGtk a mature library with respect to version stability
> > and documentation.
> 
> Not sure, sorry.
> 
> > PyQt is a huge library (thanks to Qt), but not free on W32, or?
> 
> Right, either not free or limited on win32.  I got a license for it as a
> part of Blackadder, now out of beta and costing $50 I believe.  It's
> indeed a marvel of power and ease of use on all scores, IMHO.  But
> if you must have the full power on win32 and can't spend that much,
> it's not an option.
> 
> > Is there any possibility that any of the above-mentioned libraries will be
> > included as a standard library in any of the near-future Python
> > distributions?
> 
> If you mean those made by the PSF, I don't see anything taking the
> place of Tkinter in the near future.  Tkinter is what wonderful free
> PSF tools like IDLE are based on, so it will stay.  Other distributions
> are perfectly free to bundle all they want.
> 
> 
> > I myself program on W32 at work, but use Linux at home. So, which one
> > should I start with in order to reduce the effort of learning something
> > new and to be productive in the shortest time possible?
> 
> If you're sure you can't afford any form of PyQt, Tkinter is probably
> simplest to use, but limited and maybe not as good-looking as you
> might like, wxWindows is probably richer and better looking.
> 
> 
> > By the way, how do I most easily include plotting capabilities to my
> > Python-apps?
> 
> A couple dozen tools are linked to from:
> http://www.python.org/topics/scicomp/plotting.html
> and there are few others too.  I do not know which one will be
> easiest for you to use.
> 
> 
> Alex
> 
> 
> > 
> > Carl




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