24.6. Other Graphical User Interface Packages

There are an number of extension widget sets to Tkinter.

See also

Python megawidgets

is a toolkit for building high-level compound widgets in Python using the Tkinter module. It consists of a set of base classes and a library of flexible and extensible megawidgets built on this foundation. These megawidgets include notebooks, comboboxes, selection widgets, paned widgets, scrolled widgets, dialog windows, etc. Also, with the Pmw.Blt interface to BLT, the busy, graph, stripchart, tabset and vector commands are be available.

The initial ideas for Pmw were taken from the Tk itcl extensions [incr Tk] by Michael McLennan and [incr Widgets] by Mark Ulferts. Several of the megawidgets are direct translations from the itcl to Python. It offers most of the range of widgets that [incr Widgets] does, and is almost as complete as Tix, lacking however Tix’s fast HList widget for drawing trees.

Tkinter3000 Widget Construction Kit (WCK)

is a library that allows you to write new Tkinter widgets in pure Python. The WCK framework gives you full control over widget creation, configuration, screen appearance, and event handling. WCK widgets can be very fast and light-weight, since they can operate directly on Python data structures, without having to transfer data through the Tk/Tcl layer.

The major cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Unix-like) GUI toolkits that are also available for Python:

See also

PyGTK

is a set of bindings for the GTK widget set. It provides an object oriented interface that is slightly higher level than the C one. It comes with many more widgets than Tkinter provides, and has good Python-specific reference documentation. There are also bindings to GNOME. One well known PyGTK application is PythonCAD. An online tutorial is available.

PyQt

PyQt is a sip-wrapped binding to the Qt toolkit. Qt is an extensive C++ GUI application development framework that is available for Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. sip is a tool for generating bindings for C++ libraries as Python classes, and is specifically designed for Python. The PyQt3 bindings have a book, GUI Programming with Python: QT Edition by Boudewijn Rempt. The PyQt4 bindings also have a book, Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt, by Mark Summerfield.

wxPython

wxPython is a cross-platform GUI toolkit for Python that is built around the popular wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) C++ toolkit. It provides a native look and feel for applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix systems by using each platform’s native widgets where ever possible, (GTK+ on Unix-like systems). In addition to an extensive set of widgets, wxPython provides classes for online documentation and context sensitive help, printing, HTML viewing, low-level device context drawing, drag and drop, system clipboard access, an XML-based resource format and more, including an ever growing library of user-contributed modules. wxPython has a book, wxPython in Action, by Noel Rappin and Robin Dunn.

PyGTK, PyQt, and wxPython, all have a modern look and feel and more widgets than Tkinter. In addition, there are many other GUI toolkits for Python, both cross-platform, and platform-specific. See the GUI Programming page in the Python Wiki for a much more complete list, and also for links to documents where the different GUI toolkits are compared.