What's the best GUI toolkit in Python,Tkinter,wxPython,QT,GTK?

Tom

1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
3) Efficiency of development is high;

What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

Thanks!

Jul 18 '05 #1

Jarek Zgoda

Tom napisa³(a):

1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
3) Efficiency of development is high;

What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

It depends on your personal taste.

--
Jarek Zgoda
http://jpa.berlios.de/ | http://www.zgodowie.org/

Jul 18 '05 #2

Wilk

Tom <my*****@tom.com> writes:

1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
3) Efficiency of development is high;

What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

html !

--
William
http://wikipython.flibuste.net : wiki francophone sur python

Jul 18 '05 #3

Maurice LING

Tom wrote:

1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
3) Efficiency of development is high;

What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

Thanks!

That's almost like asking which way of cooking chicken is the best?
steam, fried, stew, roast?

I may offend heaps of people by saying this.... but Tkinter is included
in the standard package, so it should be given a look, then decide what
is lacking...

Maurice

Jul 18 '05 #4

Andrew Dalke

Maurice LING wrote:

That's almost like asking which way of cooking chicken is the best?
steam, fried, stew, roast?

BBQ'ed of course.

I believe that fits your point. :)

Andrew
da***@dalkescientific.com

Jul 18 '05 #5

Do Re Mi chel La Si Do

+1
Michel Claveau

Jul 18 '05 #6

Dave Cook

On 2005-03-27, Tom <my*****@tom.com> wrote:

1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
3) Efficiency of development is high;

What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

Don't forget Swing and SWT via Jython. Of course that brings with it all
the joys and sorrows of Java.

GTK on the Mac (OS X) requires installing and running an X server (an X
server is included on Apple's OS X install discs, but not installed by
default; it can also be downloaded for free from Apple). This may be enough
of an annoyance to turn some users off. I've had success with using GTK on
win32, and it's very standard on Linux systems.

I'm not sure what the status of QT on OS X is.

Tkinter still seems viable for things that don't require a lot of complex
controls. Also, it has a very powerful canvas widget. However, it won't
look very good on unix systems (no anti-aliasing, for one thing).

If you don't need a lot of complex controls, you might consider the embedded
webserver + browser route using CherryPy or Twisted.web + Nevow.

wxPython seems to have the best cross-platform support among CPython
toolkits, but it never seemed very Pythonic to me. There's a higher-level
package called wax that aims to remedy that.

Dave Cook

Jul 18 '05 #7

Scott Robinson

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 10:06:14 GMT, Dave Cook <da******@nowhere.net>
wrote:

On 2005-03-27, Tom <my*****@tom.com> wrote:

1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
3) Efficiency of development is high;

What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

Don't forget Swing and SWT via Jython. Of course that brings with it all
the joys and sorrows of Java.

GTK on the Mac (OS X) requires installing and running an X server (an X
server is included on Apple's OS X install discs, but not installed by
default; it can also be downloaded for free from Apple). This may be enough
of an annoyance to turn some users off. I've had success with using GTK on
win32, and it's very standard on Linux systems.

I'm not sure what the status of QT on OS X is.

Tkinter still seems viable for things that don't require a lot of complex
controls. Also, it has a very powerful canvas widget. However, it won't
look very good on unix systems (no anti-aliasing, for one thing).

If you don't need a lot of complex controls, you might consider the embedded
webserver + browser route using CherryPy or Twisted.web + Nevow.

wxPython seems to have the best cross-platform support among CPython
toolkits, but it never seemed very Pythonic to me. There's a higher-level
package called wax that aims to remedy that.

Dave Cook

PythonCard builds on wxPython (a subset, I believe) and includes a
graphic GUI builder. The way it handles the wxPython objects seems
pretty pythonic to me, but I can't say I build pretty interface with
it. PythonCard seems to like to stick to basics, but also includes a
certain ability to get to the rest of wxPython (file/save/message
dialogs are pretty easy to include).

Note that my only other experience in building GUIs was with visual
basic, which seems to have spoiled me. I tried wxPython and Tinker,
but could only really get PythonCard to work.

Scott Robinson

Jul 18 '05 #8

stewart.midwinter

Tom, there's a reason that Tkinter is included with Python - it's
probably the most straitforward of the 4 you mentioned. It's dead easy
to get running on Win32 and Linux systems (haven't tried on Mac OS, but
I hear reports of it being used).

I found GTK to be damn near impossible to install on Windows, after
numerous attempts. Maybe if you're building shrink-wrap systems you
wouldn't have the issue - just provide an executable and a .dll.

wxPython, some people say, feels like C++. That may be a pro or a
con.

As for QT, great on Linux, difficult or expensive to license on
Windows. There'll be an open-source version, but that's a year off by
the time PyQt 4 is ready.

If you haven't worked with any GUI toolkits before, why not start with
Tkinter - concepts like callbacks, threads and events, key to making
GUI apps work, are transferable between toolkits.

cheers
S

Jul 18 '05 #9

Cameron Laird

In article <sl*********************@localhost.localdomain>,
Dave Cook <da******@nowhere.net> wrote:

Jul 18 '05 #10

Fuzzyman

Undoubtably Wax :-)
Easier to learn than TKinter, with none of the limitations (it's built
on top of wxPython).

See http://zephyfalcon.org
I've just started using it and I'm really impressed.

Best Regards,

Fuzzy
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python

Jul 18 '05 #11

Kent Johnson

Fuzzyman wrote:

Undoubtably Wax :-)
Easier to learn than TKinter, with none of the limitations (it's built
on top of wxPython).

See http://zephyfalcon.org

http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/wax.html works better.

Kent

Jul 18 '05 #12

Fuzzyman

True enough :-)

Thanks
Fuzzy
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python

Jul 18 '05 #13