Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[rantingrick]

On Jan 18, 7:39 pm, "Patty" <pa... at cruzio.com> wrote:
> I agree with Corey - I also had very little experience with creating a GUI
> and using Tkinter combined with PIL plus a little help from various docs
> and getting a couple questions answered, I was pleased to find that it
> required very few actual lines of code to create a basic small window and
> display text and pictures that  I am happy with and I am sure I can use this
> small module as a base to expand on if I want to.


Hello Patty and welcome to the debate,

I am happy to see the simplicity of Tkinter has helped moved you into
the joys of GUI programming. I remember my initial days with Tkinter
and i remember the delight in achieving my first small GUI utilities.

Like you, i love the simplistic nature of Tkinter and if TclTk had as
large a widget base and maturity as wxWidgets then we would be closer
to the 21st century GUI library that Python desperately needs. However
as i know --and you will find out over time-- Tkinter is greatly
lacking in very important widgets. Widgets that are part of every
major GUI app you could imagine.

If all you do is create utilities for yourself or small apps you can
get by with Tkinter just fine. However if you try to go any further
you will then realize the limits of TclTk --and not Tkinter-- are
really the culprits behind the scenes.

But again, all this is moot because as this debate has evolved so too
has my understanding of where we need to be focusing or efforts -- and
*desktop only* is not going to cut it for the future of Python's std-
GUI-lib. We need to take a step back and see the larger picture.
Currently we have our heads stuck in the vacuum of python land,
however this GUI problem is much, much larger!