How to choose the right GUI toolkit ?

[Dan Lenski]

Hi all,
I'm a recent, belated convert from Perl. I work in a physics lab and
have been using Python to automate a lot of measurement equipment
lately. It works fabulously for this purpose. Recently I've wanted to
start writing GUIs for some of my programs, for data visualization and
to make the programs easier to use for some of my co-workers.

So far I've experimented with two Python GUI toolkits: Tkinter and
PyGTK. I've had some issues with each:

* PyGTK - not very "pythonic", in my opinion. Have to use get_ and
set_ methods rather than properties. Have to write ugly things like
textview.insert (textview.get_e nd_iter(), ...) to append text to a text
buffer. No useful doc strings, which makes experimenting with new
widgets in IPython a huge pain. The toolkit feels very "heavyweigh t".
I don't want to write an XML file and an "action group" just to make a
piddly little menubar with 10 items.

I'm an avid Gnome fan, and love the professionalnes s and completeness
of GTK, but PyGTK seems frustratingly C-like compared to the
wonderfully designed high-level abstractions I've come to love in
Python!

* TkInter - Seems easy to learn, and better for quick "lightweigh t"
GUIs. I wrote a complete working instrument GUI in less than a day of
figuring things out. Not very Pythonic in terms of creating and
modifying widgets. No factory functions to quickly create menu items.
My biggest problem with Tkinter is that it is very unreliable under
Cygwin: programs freeze and slow intermittently and the tkMessageDialog
stock dialog boxes show no visible text.

So, is there another toolkit I should be looking at? Having something
that can run easily on Cygwin and native Windows is a priority so that
I can quickly move programs to new measurement computers. I like GTK a
lot and Tk is growing on me too.. are there any higher-level "wrapper"
toolkits for GTK and Tk?

Thanks for any advice!

Dan Lenski
University of Maryland

[Jeremy Sanders]

Dan Lenski wrote:

My apologies! I'm glad to be corrected on this. There are Cygwin
packages for Qt as well, but I have heard about enough bugs to think I
should avoid Qt. I have used enough Gtk apps that run flawlessly under
Windows to have my hopes that it works well.

You normally use PyQt/Qt on Windows without Cygwin. There are very few bugs
and lots of professional companies base their products on Qt Windows.

--
Jeremy Sanders
http://www.jeremysanders.net/

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2006-11-10, Dennis Lee Bieber <wl*****@ix.net com.comwrote:

On Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:44:21 -0600, Tim Chase
<py*********@t im.thechases.co mdeclaimed the following in
comp.lang.pytho n:

>A few arbitrary warts per-dictum of BDFL are fine though...it
still looks much cleaner compared to PHP & Perl ;-)

Or line continuation in REXX... Where you get such oddities as:

call xyz(a, b, c, ,
d, e, f)

That is NOT a NULL argument between c and d... The first comma
is the argument separator, the second comma is the
to-be-continued marker

Eyiyi! That's yugly.

The colon's main purpose seems to be to allow one-liners:

Easy to parse: if a < b: a += 1
Hard to parse if a < b a += 1

--
Neil Cerutti
When you're in the public eye, it's wrong to cheat on someone, unless
you're very careful. If you're normal and no one's going to know, then
do it. --Paris Hilton

[skip]

NeilThe colon's main purpose seems to be to allow one-liners:

NeilEasy to parse: if a < b: a += 1
NeilHard to parse if a < b a += 1

No, as the note from Tim Peters referenced by Robert Kern pointed out
earlier in this thread, the ABC language designers found that
indentation-based block structure by itself wasn't enough to clue new users
in about the code structure. Adding the colon at the end of the
if/while/for clause helped.

Skip

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2006-11-09, Bjoern Schliessmann
<us************ **************@ spamgourmet.com wrote:

What about

if color == red or blue or green:
return 'primary'

:)

The Inform 6* programming language supports the serial 'or' (and
'and') and looks just like that. The disadvantage is that the
usual binary logical operators must exist and are spelled
differently. (It uses C's '||' and '&&'.)

if (color == red or blue or green && color.type == additive) {
return 'primary';
}

It also supports a switch statement syntax and semantics that
would fit nicely with Python.

switch (action) {
Eat:
print "Gulp! Delicious, but poisonous.";
deadflag = 1;
Taste:
print "You nibble at one of the corners. Yum!";
Attack:
print "What did that mushroom ever to to you?";
default:
print "You can't do that to a mushroom.";
}

There's no fall-through, and there's no syntax to enable it,
either.

In Python it would hypothetically be:

switch action:
Eat:
print "Gulp! Delicious, but poisonous."
deadflag = True
Taste:
print "You nibble at one of the corners. Yum!"
Attack:
print "What did the mushroom ever to to you?"
default:
print "You can't do that to a mushroom."

I've often wanted a "Pythonic" Inform to Inform translator, so I
can leave out all the unecessary (), {} and ;.

* Inform 6 is a language for implementing text adventures, not
to be confused with the unrelated language Inform 7.

--
Neil Cerutti

[skip]

NeilThe colon's main purpose seems to be to allow one-liners:

NeilEasy to parse: if a < b: a += 1
NeilHard to parse if a < b a += 1

Skip... the ABC language designers found that indentation-based block
Skipstructure by itself wasn't enough to clue new users in about the
Skipcode structure. Adding the colon at the end of the if/while/for
Skipclause helped.

One final note. Just because the colon isn't technically required in many
situations doesn't mean it's superfluous. If all language designers cared
about was ease of parsing we'd probably all be programming in assembler,
sendmail, brainfuck. Or, as the Zen of Python says: "Readabilit y counts".

Skip

P.S. I felt I just had to tie this into the thread on profanity somehow.
But notice that I didn't mention nazis or Hitler. ;-)

S

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Christophe <ch************ *@free.frwrote:

( and I must admit one of the reasons I avoid wx if possible, is because
I don't use Gnome under Linux and the look and feel of wx applications
is really horrible under KDE )

If you install the QT theme for GTK it all starts to look a lot nicer

Eg debian

ii gtk2-engines-gtk-qt 0.7-1 theme engine using Qt for GTK+ 2.x

You get a control panel for GTK apps in the KDE control center also.

--
Nick Craig-Wood <ni**@craig-wood.com-- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2006-11-10, sk**@pobox.com <sk**@pobox.com wrote:

>
NeilThe colon's main purpose seems to be to allow one-liners:

NeilEasy to parse: if a < b: a += 1
NeilHard to parse if a < b a += 1

No, as the note from Tim Peters referenced by Robert Kern
pointed out earlier in this thread, the ABC language designers
found that indentation-based block structure by itself wasn't
enough to clue new users in about the code structure. Adding
the colon at the end of the if/while/for clause helped.

Thanks. I worded that lousily.

--
Neil Cerutti
The Minutemen are not tall in terms of height. --Dan Bonner

[Dan Lenski]

Eric Brunel wrote:

On Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:01:51 +0100, Dan Lenski <dl*****@gmail. comwrote:

Tk 8.4 appears to use native Win32 widgets under Cygwin and native
WinXP.

It seems to depend on the widget type, and on what you call native... For
example, tk menus are definitely the native ones; tk scrollbars are the
native ones, but with the Win2k look (no XP look available yet); tk
buttons do not seem to be the native ones, as they don't act like "normal"
Windows buttons.

So, basically, Tk is actually embedding the native Win2k menus, but it
isn't actually embedding the native Win2k scrollbars... it's just
emulating their look and feel?

But it definitely doesn't use GTK widgets under Ubuntu with
Gnome desktop.

You seem to imply that GTK is "native" on Linux. It isn't, as can be seen
with the echoes of the "holy war" between Gnome and KDE that we often see
around here. As an aside, I personnally work on Linux and don't even use
any of these environments (both are too much Windows-like to my taste...).

I didn't imply that GTK widgets are "native" on Linux. I implied that
GTK widgets native under Gnome ;-) I was basing my assumption on an
earlier poster who said that Tk 8.x can use native widgets on all
supported platforms... so I assumed that under Gnome it should use GTK
widgets.

Is there a way to get it to do so?

Not yet. But tcl/tk 8.5 will include the Tile extension including new
themable widgets. See here:
http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/...hots/unix.html

Good to know! I'm looking forward to 8.5.

Dan

[vdicarlo]

I highly recommend wxPython. It's very mature, full-featured, and

portable, and fairly easy to learn as well.

I am also a Python beginner thinking about what GUI toolkit to use, and
the availability of a free video screencast series on installing and
using wxpython at showmedo.com is making me want to go that way. I
viewed their introduction to Python resources and wished I had found it
first.

The wxpython series is at http://tinyurl.com/yggean

Vincent

[Bjoern Schliessmann]

Neil Cerutti wrote:

On 2006-11-09, Bjoern Schliessmann

>if color == red or blue or green:
return 'primary'

:)

The Inform 6* programming language supports the serial 'or' (and
'and') and looks just like that.

Python also supports it.

The disadvantage is that the usual binary logical operators must
exist and are spelled differently. (It uses C's '||' and '&&'.)

Do they have to be spelled differently? In Python, they don't have
to.

Regards,
Björn

--
BOFH excuse #115:

your keyboard's space bar is generating spurious keycodes.