GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Dan Stromberg]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:22 PM, ant <shimbo at uklinux.net> wrote:

> I get the strong feeling that nobody is really happy with the state of
> Python GUIs.
> Tkinter is not widely liked, but is widely distributed. WxPython and
> PyGtk are both
> powerful, but quirky in different ways. PyQt is tied to one platform.
> And there are
> dozens more.
>

I too am not that stoked by the state of Python GUI's.

I too feel that creating yet another GUI toolkit is probably not the
solution - that just increases balkanization unless the new GUI somehow
magically gains substantial momentum in ways that the GUI's that came before
it didn't (not impossible, but far from easy).

I don't like feeling like when I write a GUI, it's almost certainly going to
require additional dependencies that people will grumble about, to run on
another platform, or even another system.

I don't agree that because Python is opensource, that there's nobody with
any influence over it.  If Guido and the various book authors banded
together and made a joint decision about a favored GUI toolkit, I believe
that'd help.  I believe it's helped with Django to have Guido put some
weight behind it (but didn't, and shouldn't have, prevented Tornado).
However, this would likely diminish their referent power some, because some
people are not going to like the decision, and eventually the chosen GUI
will begin getting old too.

As I see it, the problems are twofold:
1) Some people want something small (which almost certainly wouldn't remain
small for long), and some people want something for serious development
(which isn't small, and may be offputting for some downloaders and people
who want GUI's to be simple to code).
2) The *ix GTK people probably won't be happy with anything that isn't GTK.
The *ix Qt people probably won't be happy with anything that isn't Qt.  And
wxWindows and PyGUI are good at cross platform, but they both wrap GTK and
not Qt (and I prefer GTK to Qt, but if wxWindows or PyGUI don't wrap Qt too,
they're going to be looked down upon by a number of Qt people - rather
understandably).

I think the answer is to persuade the Qt people to port wxWindows and/or
PyGUI to Qt, and to have a Separate download, ON PYTHON.ORG, for The Favored
GUI binaries, and perhaps an automated build script as well for the various
dependencies when not already satisfied.  Or at the very least, with a
single link to another website with The Favored GUI.

Better still, if we can make wxWindows or PyGUI work overtop of:
A) Qt (already mentioned)
B) A webbrowser with Javascript, analogous to Pyjamas or GWT
C) A character-cell, curses "GUI" interface (much more optional).
D) An easily-scriptable, command-line-options-and-config-files interface for
testing and automation (optional, but very nice and perhaps difficult)

...then I think we'll really be onto something.  But these are not small
tasks.

I'm not at all pleased with Tk or TCL as a "solution".  They're mostly there
due to inertia at this point, and agree that they're holding Python back.

I mostly write GUI's for pygtk or the web today, because I'm almost always
on a system with pygtk already there, and because just about everyone who
uses software can get to the web.

Batteries included matters.  Balkanization matters.
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