Future standard GUI library

[Terry Jan Reedy]

On 5/18/2013 10:03 AM, Beinan Li wrote:
> Not sure if this is the right place to talk about this.

It is.

> Even less sure if I can
> move this discussion to tkinter list,

The idea of replacing tkinter is not about improving tkinter ;-).

> Do you think tkinter is going to be the standard python built-in gui
> solution as long as python exists?

AT the moment, there is nothing really comparable that is a realistic 
candidate to replace tkinter. Tkinter is a tcl-based c gui library. wx 
and qt4 are gui application frameworks that include a gui library -- and 
much more that duplicate part of Python's stdlib. They, and consequently 
their Python wrappers, are too big. That is quite aside from the fact 
that the authors of the wrappers have good reason to not donate their 
code, but stay independent.

PyGui was designed as a gui library comparable to tkinter and a possible 
replacement. But according to the web page, it is still not completely 
ready for py 3 (the last update was July 2011).
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python_gui/

I think a tkinter replacement should be written for at least 3.4+, so it 
can use the new 3.3 unicode implementation and use or at least integrate 
with the new 3.4 event loop that will be part of the planned new async 
library.

One test for any new gui library is whether idle can be rewritten in it. 
It heavily uses the tag features of the tk text widget.

TJR