GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Terry Reedy]

Ant
I agree that the current tk situation is not completely satisfactory. In 
particular, the IO facilities are inadequate and have not, to my 
knowledge, changed in a decade. Image input formats are limited. There 
is no canvas output as an image. (Output of the canvase display list as 
a dialect of postscript that not everything can read is not a substitute 
for this.)

However...
I think it important that Python come with a minimal IDE that is 
adequate for someone like me doing Python-only development. I thank the 
programmers of IDLE. So merely deleting tk/tkinter is not an option. 
Indeed, having something similar to and at least as good as IDLE for any 
candidate gui replacememt should and I think would be a requirement for 
consideration.

The problem with the big gui application frameworks are that they are 
too big. The two I have glanced at -- wx... and qt -- have much more 
than gui stuff and duplicate parts of the Python stdlib and other 3rd 
party libs.

As for a small gui written in Python, you seem to have ignored the link 
to pygui. Of course that has its own problems. Among others: it is 
incomplete; it ignore Python 3 (requires 2.3+ should be 2.3 to 2.6), 
which is the only place it could be added; the api sytle is not standard 
in Python (get_xx and set_xx methods instead of direct access or 
properties); and there is nothing yet like IDLE.

What would be required is a Python3 GUI project with multiple contributors.

Terry Jan Reedy