Python GUI?

Benjamin Kaplan benjamin.kaplan at case.edu
Tue Sep 17 12:19:28 EDT 2013


On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 7:55 AM, rusi <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 12, 2013 10:21:49 PM UTC+5:30, Benjamin Kaplan wrote:
>
>> The main difference between wx and qt is that qt looks native on every platform
>> while wx *is* native on every platform (it uses native controls wherever
>> possible). This means that wx integrates into the OS better, but your also more
>> likely to need OS-specific tweaks in wx, at least from my experience from a few
>> years ago.
>
> For someone who is GUI-challenged, can you please expand on that a bit?
> --

Sure. Every platform provides its own GUI library (Cocoa on Mac OS X,
Win32 on Windows). Other programs that want to hook into yours, such
as screen readers, are familiar with the platform's native GUI
elements- it knows what a Win32 combo box is, and it knows how to read
the text inside it.

The other way to make a GUI is to take a blank canvas and draw on it
yourself. This is more flexible and provides a more consistent
experience across platforms, but unless you specifically go out of
your way to provide hooks for other programs to jump in, all they see
is a bunch of pixels on the screen. In addition, drawing your own
stuff won't necessarily give you the "normal for the operating system"
behavior on other things, like tab behavior. It's possible for
non-native GUI environments to mimic this behavior (and QT does a
pretty good job of this), but there's always going to be little things
that seem a bit off.

The situation is a bit more complicated because QT is the native
toolkit on KDE, so in that environment, QT will be more "correct" than
wx, which would be using GTK if present and plain X11 if it isn't.



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