PysimpleGUI

https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI

by nothrowaways • 3 years ago

277 153 3 years ago

mkesper• 3 years ago

Does anyone have experience with this? The goal to lower the entry bar for GUI development seems laudable to me, wonder where the solution stops to work, though.

dilawar2• 3 years ago

Not to answer your question but it brings back some nice memories. I was in college when author started this project. He worked a lot on it. After a few years, he stopped and archived the project. Looks like it's back again. Nice!

I used it in all my college demo and small projects and I loved it. The most complex GUI that I made was a oscilloscope frontend for lab-made signal recorder. It is indeed a simplegui library.

thastings• 3 years ago

This is an awesome library. I've used it for multiple, mostly internal tools. The more complex one were a tool for cardiac action potential analysis and another for the evaluation of multiple choice tests. Complexity exploded over time, but that hinged on my coding skills, or lack thereof... PySimpleGUI did enable me to make GUI tools without getting my hands dirty outside my Python world, so kudos for that. Protip: the 'Reddit' theme looks way more modern compared to the other ones. Use that to get away from the 90s looks.

daedrdev• 3 years ago

It works quite well for small and medium sized programs, far better than I expected. The looping system is quite easy to use, and there is even a nice system for calling long functions without blocking the GUI.

You can even use pyinstaller to make a fake application using it.

I’d say it stops working so well if you want a ”modern” looking GUI, as the GUI looks pretty old.

Also, the documentation is really good imo.

RaftPeople• 3 years ago

Yes it works, and my needs for GUI's are relatively simple so I haven't hit limits+issues. "Relatively simple"=Business app stuff like CRUD and also personal project+task mgmt tools.

Before I landed on this one I spent significant time testing/prototyping PyQt and TkInter. Those tools required more effort than I was looking for (based on expectations from past environments and tools for business app dev). PySimpleGUI is quicker and easier than the other tools and is powerful enough for my needs.

lionkor6• 3 years ago

I have one comment, and I hope it's not rude: There is too much text. Everywhere where you can put text, the author put a lot of it. Sentence after sentence, rambling on. Coherently so, most of the time, sure, but just one after the other and not a single relevant screenshot for the first thousand words.

Something is not right here. Either this is a joung enthusiastic coder, which is probably the case, or there is so much text in order to convince you to try it.

The readme even has an about me section where the author introduces himself.

For some examples, scroll to random points in the readme and read a few paragraphs, then repeat what you just read.

dilawar2• 3 years ago

Lol. He is definitely not young as in inexperienced coder. He will definitely not going to win awards for barely sufficient documentation and docs organisation. Dude got a personality.

I've followed the project when I was in college and used it in my personal project.

baz002• 3 years ago

I just scanned it. It's not an MVP for some product they want to attract investors. It's a tool. Which has documentation written by someone who wrote it.

I hope this one is not rude too: are you sure you're just not afraid of having to read stuff rather than being spoon fed bullet points and steps?

lionkor6• 3 years ago

Give me a wordcount on that readme, you'll see what I mean. If it was 1/3rd the length it'd still be one of the longest readmes ive ever read - and almsot all the ones ive read and written are by humans.

ptx• 3 years ago

I think the problem with the README is that it sounds more like a marketing brochure than documentation. It's full of slogans and weird illustrations comparing it to "Other Python GUIs".

jbstack2• 3 years ago

I'll gladly take long but coherent documentation over poor or non-existent documentation. This is a strange thing to complain about in my opinion.

lionkor6• 3 years ago

I usually (and maybe annoyingly) give negative feedback on both missing and overly talkative docs equally

tjpnz• 3 years ago

I found it delightful and appreciate the lengths the author went in explaining why this exists and the goals of the project. A breath of fresh air compared to the usual sea of boilerplate and links to proprietary chat apps I don't want to use.

lionkor6• 3 years ago

I urge you to scroll to any point in the readme and read, and recount what you read, because most of it is repetetive and fluff for no (obvious to me) reason

bmitc9• 3 years ago

There is a lot of non-information, for sure. For example,

Some programs are not well-suited for PySimpleGUI however. By definition, PySimpleGUI implements a subset of the underlying GUI frameworks' capabilities. It's difficult to define exactly which programs are well suited for PySimpleGUI and which are not. It depends on the details of your program. Duplicating Excel in every detail is an example of something not well suited for PySimpleGUI.

says absolutely nothing and gives the reader no useful leads as to the applicability of the framework to their project.

T-A2• 3 years ago

Either this is a joung enthusiastic coder, which is probably the case

From "About Me" [1]

I've been writing software since the 70s. The majority of my career was spent creating products in Silicon Valley

[1] https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI#about-me-

sp0rk• 3 years ago

I would say your comment is most definitely rude, especially the part where you reduce the reason for the text to two options, neither of which are very flattering. Incidentally, it seems like neither of your given reasons are accurate either.

You could have gotten the same idea across by saying something like "This is a visual project so I feel like it should include more screenshots in the main description" and leaving the insulting assumptions out entirely.

lionkor6• 3 years ago

Thats not my main point, though - my point is that this rambling text doesnt work as a readme, for me, and i feel its much too long and has little content for the amount of text

dbsmith83• 3 years ago

Each section has a clear heading. If you don't care about a section, all you have to do is scroll a little bit. No one is forcing you to read the "about me" section.

Some people actually enjoy reading about tools, rather than just looking at it from an entitled viewpoint of "what can I do to get this running as fast as humanly possible while reading as minimal words as possible". This is a tool that someone else wrote that you get to use for free, so stop whining and let them be free to express themselves as they see fit.

lionkor6• 3 years ago

I'm just not going to use it, yes, i felt like it was only fair to say why

doubloon• 3 years ago

I think the problem is they named it "Simple", thus implanting in the mind of the reader a certain preconception about what to expect.

It is like if you name your project with the words Smart, Open, Trusted, Secure, etc etc, people will tend to point out that it doesn't meet it's name ideal.

Contrast with a project like C or BSD. What's the opposite of C? Nothing. Nobody can point out that "Hey, the C language doesn't live up to it's name" because it's name has no connotations or preconceptions.

phyalow• 3 years ago

In 2023 isnt it almost always better to make a webapp through dash or something if you need a “gui”?

bufio• 3 years ago

No.

baz002• 3 years ago

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.

It depends on your requirements. I still produce actual native GUIs for tools I write. They're faster, require less futzing to service, generally continue working for years if not decades, have far richer control possibilities out of the box and tend not to rely on 5000 layers of excrement slapped on top of each other.

Oh and no fucking Javascript!

jbstack2• 3 years ago

As a user, definitely not. Web apps are slow, require an internet connection, don't integrate nicely with my OS, and generally inferior to native GUIs in just about every way.

halfcat6• 3 years ago

And now the user needs a server running somewhere.

We tried this approach once, for this exact reason that we didn’t want an “old thick client”. Our app interacted heavily with the user’s OS and their line of business app, and it was a nightmare dealing with the customer’s IT department, wondering why we needed to run HTTP servers everywhere, causing security alerts.

We switched it to a simple Tkinter app and everyone involved was much happier.

mardifoufs3• 3 years ago

Python is such a nightmare to package and use for users, especially for Gui, that even web apps can be better.

deafpolygon4• 3 years ago

Let's not forget that a web app, in general terms, requires a web server to run. Most users don't have the expertise or patience to run a server (not to mention all of the risks that come with running one).

Xeamek• 3 years ago

...but why?

notyoutube3• 3 years ago

I've got one very convincing reason: distribution. Having a web app makes it:

* usable on pretty much any platform

* easy to distribute/update

* easily trustworthy/jailed (no need to install something that might access your data)

It makes me sad, but as far as I can see, there is no serious alternative for universal+jailed apps.

quietbritishjim5• 3 years ago

Looks good. I have a suggestion for it, although it might be this library is too mature for such a dramatic change: use dictionaries (which, as of a recent Python, remember which order the elements were inserted) instead of lists.

I did something like that in an old job, except it was a much thinner wrapper around PyQt (and surprisingly little code). A key difference is that setting properties/signals and nesting widgets was done together. One benefit of that over setting properties in the constructor is that, if you need a name for a widget (e.g., to set the text later), you can still set the properties of it in the main bulk of the view.

    self.mytext = QTextEdit()
    view = {
        "title": "My Window Title",
        QVBoxLayout(): {
            self.mytext: {
                "text": "Initial text",
            },
            QPushButton(): {
                "text": "copy from self.mytext",
                "clicked": self.copy_text,
            }
        }
    }
    setup_view(self, view)

The "setup_view" function was the whole API. They talked about opening sourcing it as part of something else – I hope they do because I found it really handy for quickly knocking together simple GUIs. But this library looks like a good alternative, so thanks for posting.

JimDabell• 3 years ago

use dictionaries (which, as of a recent Python, remember which order the elements were inserted) instead of lists.

It feels that way to me too but that change was introduced in Python 3.7, which is over five years old now!

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html#summary-release-...

gpderetta• 3 years ago

AFAIK 3.7 only officially blessed the status quo. Python dictionaries have preserved insert order for a long time.

ape4• 3 years ago

From the github page: "The window definition is simplified by using Python core data types understood by beginners (lists and dictionaries)."

quietbritishjim5• 3 years ago

Why do you post that quote? I think there must be some implied meaning I'm not getting. Is there a way to use dictionaries to set properties and nest widgets in a similar way to my code example?

Too• 3 years ago

Looking at the latest trends of GUI frameworks, decoupling the layout from the data gives much cleaner code. Let the framework take care of all the data binding for you. Both web and desktop go more and more in this direction. Nobody does

That means, avoid mutating widgets directly. Instead bind their properties to some data store that rerenders automatically on change. The input/output example on their page demonstrates something like this.

Nobody does getElementById() any more.

ptek• 3 years ago

RebolView ??

Izkata3• 3 years ago

I was also wondering if there's some influence there, it looks very much like that but implemented as native python data structures.

BoppreH2• 3 years ago

I'm really, really excited about these GUI frameworks. Native desktop experience is so much better than web-view amalgamations. And kudos to PySimpleGUI for the simplified event loop, and multi-backend approach, that is genuinely new.

I do wonder why don't we see more "automatic" GUIs: given some data structures and functions, make a passable interface to interact with them. Use heuristics to pick when a panel should be vertically or horizontally laid out, or placed in a tabbed interface, or a popup, etc. It would unlock a lot of functionality that is too nested for CLI and too "native" for web apps.

scrlk2• 3 years ago

This might be of interest to you:

Gooey - Turn (almost) any Python 3 Console Program into a GUI application with one line

https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

BoppreH2• 3 years ago

Thanks, that's exactly the right direction. But not yet the right magnitude. You're still limited to what's representable as single CLI invocations.

abecedarius• 3 years ago

"automatic" GUIs

There was something answering that description a couple decades ago, called Naked Objects. Never tried it because I wasn't into Java, but it sounded useful.

kspacewalk2• 3 years ago

TraitsUI was/is a good "automatic UI" for python.

destructionator• 3 years ago

I've played with this a bit over the years, starting with my automatic form generator for the web back in 2011 based on function arguments (coupled with an automatic data to html thing to see the function output), and more recently some similar stuff for my gui toolkit too (using the D programming language).

For example, you can write:

``` import arsd.minigui;

void main() { // need to define the data you want in a struct, // it requires a struct even if you only want one item struct Data { string code; }

// then do the dialog function with the struct and it // auto-creates a dialog for all the parts of the struct // and calls the function you provide when the user hits OK dialog((Data received) { // you got the number here

  messageBox("You gave me " ~ received.code);

 });

 // need to run the event loop explicitly so main doesn't return
        // early and end your program; this will return when all windows are closed
 EventLoop.get.run();

} ```

You can also attach some user defined attributes to tell it which widget you want to control the thing (defaults are line input for string and int, drop-down select for enum, groups for structs... that's about all i bothered to implement so far, tbh my gui toolkit is more of a side project toy than a main event so the time i put in is limited), for example using `@ControlledBy!VerticalSlider(0, 100)` on an `int` to make it a slider from 0 to 100 instead of a text box asking for a number.

My menu thing uses this too, you can attach functions to menus and it can pop up a dialog. For example you might do `@menu("Search") Find(string text) { ... }` and let it auto-generate the menu and dialog box for it. I also have a `DataControllerWidget` which does the callback on any change event, allowing for real-time manipulation. I wrote a little blog post about this a couple years ago (seriously, i move sooooo slowly on this stuff!) http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2020_11_02.ht...

I'd love to spend more time on this, I think it is really cool, but tbh I haven't gone too far beyond the basics and since day job has no use for such stuff it gotta be squeezed into when i feel like doing code on the weekend.

hiAndrewQuinn3• 3 years ago

I'm considering taking a tool I have which has a pretty nicely fleshed-out CLI interface and wrapping a GUI around it, so people who don't run desktop Linux can use it too. This seems like it might be perfect for my needs.

https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

Mostly I'm wondering whether anyone else has ever done what I'm trying to do here. My tool has well defined CSV, TSV and JSON flags -- has anyone else ever tried to use an actual full CLI tool unchanged to build a GUI around? What challenges should I be ready to face?

speps3• 3 years ago

Look at Handbrake, which is a glorified UI for ffmpeg for example.

ElongatedMusket• 3 years ago

I use both handbrake GUI and yt-dlp GUI. Here's something they both do horribly and I would suggest for any CLI tool with a GUI wrapper: have a persistent textarea at the bottom of the GUI that shows the equivalent CLI call to the settings I select in real time. This will teach the user how your tool works and also give GUI-only users a taste of the power they could have if they used the command line.

So basically, treat the GUI as a stepping stone to helping the user build scripts/workflows around your CLI. That way you are only developing the CLI, and the GUI is just a helper app. The second you start adding features to the GUI that can't be done in the CLI, you are now maintaining two separate apps.

halfcat6• 3 years ago

Chess engines are a good reference for this. The decision-making part is a CLI that plugs into a GUI like WinBoard[0] or Arena[1]. There’s a protocol the engine and GUI follow, such as the WinBoard or UCI[2] protocols, which just exchange text commands via STDIN/STDOUT.

The main challenges are the same problems you’d run into with multithreading, like deadlock where the GUI and CLI are both waiting on the other. So both sides typically need to be running their I/O in a separate thread from the “business logic”, so both sides remain responsive.

A second common issue is idiosyncrasies around each OS’s handling of pipes, things like making sure you flush the buffer, or just the different OS-level API calls that differ between Linux, Mac, and Windows.

[0] http://hgm.nubati.net/

[1] http://www.playwitharena.de/

[2] https://gist.github.com/DOBRO/2592c6dad754ba67e6dcaec8c90165...

hiAndrewQuinn3• 3 years ago

Much obliged! Chess GUIs are a very natural extension of a CLI, thank you!

scrlk2• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that nothing has filled the void that VB6 left behind in the rapid application development space. The language wasn't great, but VB6's strength was the drag and drop GUI builder.

speps3• 3 years ago

Same paradigm with UI stored in manually editable files

https://qb64.com/inform.html

physicsguy• 3 years ago

It’s easier to spin up something as a local web server these days for the majority

T-A2• 3 years ago

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

squarefoot• 3 years ago

As another user suggested, Lazarus is worth of consideration, although for a more VB-like experience, Gambas might be interesting too.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

StevePerkins• 3 years ago

VB6's strength was that Windows was a virtual monopoly at the time. Today you have more fragmentation, where the user masses are still mostly on Windows but the developers are mostly on Macs or Linux.

Developing a desktop GUI framework for a single platform is relatively easy. Developing a cross-platform GUI framework for three or more platforms is extremely hard. And a lot of people would STILL ignore it if it's not "mobile first", targeting iOS and Android too (meaning that it's probably dogshit for desktop apps).

tredre33• 3 years ago

but the developers are mostly on Macs or Linux.

Is that really true outside of web devs?

800xl• 3 years ago

Xojo is basically VB6's spiritual successor.

https://xojo.com/

nurettin• 3 years ago

I haven't felt any void. 20+ years of Qt, Delphi and then Lazarus was enough.

RockRobotRock• 3 years ago

wxformbuilder can get you 80% there

extraduder_ire• 3 years ago

Drag and drop UI design kept me using qtcreator for way longer than I would have otherwise. Usefully, you can just plonk the layout file next to your python script to use it with pyqt, since the IDE's python support isn't great. (may just be my borked install)

amelius• 3 years ago

Wouldn't a HTML-like (DOM) interface be even more simple?

halfcat6• 3 years ago

Textual[0] does this for CLI apps. That’s not for full GUI apps, but it’s very DOM-like, uses CSS selectors, etc. and a cool option when it meets your needs.

[0] https://github.com/Textualize/textual

zaptheimpaler• 3 years ago

Visual Basic is that you??

bmitc9• 3 years ago

What is the recommended modern way to write GUIs in Python? Assume I'm in Python 3.12 and have a Poetry project as my management solution and that I have general software and GUI experience. What do I use? My application might have lots of streaming data to be plotted, streaming images to be displayed, lots of buttons and other elements. Is it PyQt6 with PyQtGraph? I don't want it to look like a Python app.

JodieBenitez• 3 years ago

I have used PySide6: https://pypi.org/project/PySide6/

Looks fine, works fine, API matches the C++ docs... slightly unpythonic at times but at least it's well documented.

bmitc9• 3 years ago

What is the sales pitch over PyQt? What's the difference? It seems it's more just direct bindings to Qt?

loloquwowndueo2• 3 years ago

What does “a Python app” even look like?

bmitc9• 3 years ago

I wouldn't want it to be clear it was made with Python with some vey Python-y library that makes things look a certain way. I want the app to look modern in a way that it could have been written in C# for all the user knows.

KANahas• 3 years ago

Tkinter is fairly basic but feels very native on every platform I’ve tried, and it’s easy to use. There are lots of extensions available too. I just wrote a comment about it:

If you’re interested in Python desktop apps, check out TKinter. I have a piece of boilerplate code I typically start with [0], and within an hour I can have a finished piece of software that runs in the native windows manager on any OS with no libraries or frameworks to manage. It’s not the prettiest code but it’s very easy to write and I love how native it is.

[0] https://gist.github.com/kylenahas/a07f2ce8ced689975eae56d6ea...

bmitc9• 3 years ago

How well does it handle live updating charts?

wdroz2• 3 years ago

For native GUI, DearPyGui[0] as modern as you can.

For browser web-based GUI, you can use nicegui[1]

[0] -- https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui

[1] -- https://github.com/zauberzeug/nicegui

bmitc9• 3 years ago

Besides being intermediate mode-only, how does it compare to PyQt? How well does it do for streaming data to charts?

akasakahakada• 3 years ago

Why can't we design a GUI using GUI in 2023? I need to see which is which on the screen man!

notpushkin2• 3 years ago

This is called RAD, yeah. There's Qt Designer for Qt and Glade for GTK, for example. (I still miss Delphi 6 though)

simonbarker87• 3 years ago

What's the solution for shipping a desktop Python app these days? I use Python a lot for small internal tools and always land up having to ship it as part of a web service and build a web UI for it so staff can use it as "set up conda, install the deps and run python ... " doesn't fly

noncovalence• 3 years ago

There's a few projects that can package a python environment into a single executable (the main tradeoff is you end up including a copy of python with every single executable if you have lots of tools) - when I wanted it to create an installer (.msi/.dmg), I've found cx_Freeze came the closest to "it just works".

longqzh• 3 years ago

Pyinstaller just works.

quietbritishjim5• 3 years ago

It secretly extracts its internal Python files to a temp directory and runs them from there, which can look a bit virus-ish and can potentially leave them lying around forever if the application doesn't exit cleanly.

quietbritishjim5• 3 years ago

I find Nuitka worked a lot better than the alternatives. It genuinely compiles the Python to an executable, rather the all the other alternatives (like pyinstaller) which actually have the Python files hidden inside of them. It doesn't give any particular speed advantage (despite that being the original point) but works very well for packaging.

I would suggest using the "standalone" mode of Nuitka. As the name suggests, it is self contained, but it's a lot of files per program because all the C extension modules are separate files. It's tempting to use "onefile" model instead because it really is over for so seems neater, but this is really just a self extracting program with the same files hidden inside as standalone, so has a few issues like the other packagers (e.g. can trigger virus warnings or leave files lying around in temp directory).

__d4• 3 years ago

I've had good experience with PyInstaller across macOS, Windows, and Linux.

I've mostly used PyQt5, and it's able to package that without any extra effort.

I use the "package it all into one file" option: it's a little slow to start, but for my purposes (primarily, longer-running applications) that's ok.

KolmogorovComp• 3 years ago

The examples look straight up taken from the 90s esthetically [0]. Don’t get me wrong, for prototyping/internal tools that need a GUI to be usable by people not tech savvy enough to use a CLI it’s perfect, but what about the cases where you want things to look good?

While native UI are always best for performance etc, I’ve always found them harder to style than a webpage.

What is the equivalent of components (listed of styled components that go together) in python GUI? Something like for Flutter or SwiftUI, that look slick without much effort.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/ma...

_dain_• 3 years ago

what's wrong with the 90s look? many people like it.

I hate the new generation of UIs: acres of whitespace, buttons that don't look like buttons, disappearing scrollbars, hamburgor menus.

wredue• 3 years ago

acres of white space

I recently tried overwatch and I seriously cannot find a single damned thing in that UI.

Unlabelled buttons. Shit in completely random places. Extra buttons where not needed just to insert ridiculous white space. Components that don’t have functionality you expect, which is only granted by happening in to the similar component from a different pathway.

What an utterly idiotic UI. If you are a manager at blizzard, please fire these bone heads that did this.

analog31• 3 years ago

I'm sure it's a matter of either doing it well or poorly, but in my experience, "styled" UI's are one of the reasons why software is so bad for most software and most users. At least the default UI style provided by the OS is something people can learn and transfer from one app to another. And since I'm not a gifted UI designer, it's probably better than anything I can come up with.

It also adds to the already crippling cost of software development. The words you dread to hear from marketing: "Our software looks old."

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

I don't mind the 90s look at all, but it doesn't even match the OS look from back in the 90s. The checkbox backgrounds are wrong, the title label at the top is misaligned, the Exit button is in the wrong place, the entire thing screams "badly designed".

There was software like this in the 90s, but it's not the 90s aesthetic people usually talk about. A lot of work went into the design of Windows 95's user interface.

eternityforest3• 3 years ago

If looks are a top priority, web pages seem pretty hard to beat.

They also give built in separation of frontend and backend, and the option of remote access should you later need it.

Plus, you can use them just like a native app: Just make a tiny minimal tkinter or similar kind of GUI, that just has an "Open browser UI" button.

You can even secure it against daemons running as other users on the same machine, by having the launch button put a token in the URL, but I haven't seen this done anywhere.

zinekeller• 3 years ago

The problem is that Tkinter (at least for Windows) is really based on 90s widgets. You could set PySimpleGUI's theme to "SystemDefaultForReal" but it will still look out-of-place because the native Windows widgets has that modern look while Tkinter has never been updated at all.

simulo• 3 years ago

Since some comments point out that the design looks old: I agree.

However, the framework’s author describes the usecase as building simple UIs for what otherwise would be used via the command line or for building UIs for cases when people can't or don’t want to learn a more complex framework (this could include HTML/CSS/JS, which is quite complex, if you do not know it yet!).

siddheshgunjal• 3 years ago

I kinda prefer CustomTKinter, which has a much elegant and material theme-like look. Supports light/dark theme as per system on windows/Linux/MacOS.

laveur• 3 years ago

Thanks for posting about this. I had no clue it existed and I have to say I agree I really like how elegant it looks.

spamatica• 3 years ago

Been working with it for the last year or so and the looks are alright but I just completely loathe the way tkinter is designed... it just feels so old.

lithiumii• 3 years ago

I once made a simple serial monitor GUI with this. It's really easy to use, and has better defaults than vanilla tkinter.

However, as soon as I discovered VS Code's serial monitor plugin I abandoned my project.

gabrielsroka• 3 years ago

I wrote a very simple Python gui tool and posted it a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111269

29athrowaway2• 3 years ago

PyGTK is not hard to use. ChatGPT can help you generate an app.

_dmn72• 3 years ago

Good luck packaging that on Windows though. PyQt generally works better if you need cross-platform support.

29athrowaway2• 3 years ago

I stopped caring about Windows long ago.

If my software doesn't build on Windows, it's probably by design.

mikewarot• 3 years ago

Well, it's starting to get close to the ease of use of VB6 or Delphi/Lazarus. Progress is definitely being made, now they just need an interactive GUI builder, so you can just #import the forms you make, the Bob's your Uncle.

---

I lost a boatload of time on a project trying to get WxPython and WxFormBuilder to work together years back... any little change in the forms broke everything in the backend. I finally wrote a little shim that mated everything up, until I had to change a fields Type, and it broke everything. It appears that won't be the case here. (Thank goodness!)

MaxBarraclough• 3 years ago

Supported frameworks include tkinter, Qt, WxPython, or Remi. The term "wrapper" is sometimes used for these kinds of packages.

Other than the support for web UIs, this seems like Java AWT but for Python. It presumably has the 'lowest common denominator' problem of supporting only those widgets which are available in all the wrapped GUI toolkits.

For desktop UI work, why not just use Qt's official Python bindings? Qt has good cross-platform support, and its Python API seems very approachable.

https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython-6/quickstart.html#create-a-sim...

dang• 3 years ago

Python GUIs for Humans – Transforms UI into People-Friendly Pythonic Interfaces - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28600922 - Sept 2021 (43 comments)

magicmicah853• 3 years ago

We had a work requirement to start logging hours in Jira. I hated having the website open, it was slow to find the Jira I was working on, find the link for logging hours and adding a comment. I wanted a desktop app that had a list of issues assigned to me with buttons to add comments and work log hours.

I messed with Tkinter but was struggling for awhile just getting it to look…nice. I stumbled on PySimpleGUI and suddenly I was flying. Setup the hooks to the Jira api and I had what I wanted. Was a great project to learn UI development.

KeplerBoy• 3 years ago

Is it learning UI development though? Does any of this translate or scale to more demanding projects?

mkoubaa• 3 years ago

30% of all software engineering is scaling things that werent designed for scale

magicmicah853• 3 years ago

Before you learn React, you should learn html and JavaScript and before you learn those, you should know how to read. Every skill builds on the next. For me, having a positive experience with this led to more positive experiences with MAUI and GTK. I’m not writing out the most scaled out projects - I’m just having fun learning.

seusscat• 3 years ago

Do you have the sources for this application available somewhere? I was considering writing something similar just this week. So an already available application where I just point it to the right instance would be amazing

magicmicah853• 3 years ago

I’ll see if I can publish it. It’s not proprietary but I just have to get the blessings first.

vasco• 3 years ago

We had a work requirement to start logging hours in Jira

They told us they'll start doing this at my job. I started looking for a new one.

cma• 3 years ago

Logging detailed hours is now basically a requirement nationally in the US because of the messed up change to the tax code that makes companies separate out maintenence development from greenfield development.

Shawnj22• 3 years ago

My workplace has this as a requirement for a legal reason and we recently switched from Jira to the equivalent MS timesheet platform and it’s way worse. The other side of the grass isn’t always greener

Self-Perfection• 3 years ago

It seems that Jira is so unbearably universally slow that lots of people tries to interact with it via some custom made tool.

A friend of mine told that one of his jobs he developed simple internal Qt client to perform basic tasks in Jira.

And when I was required to track my tasks in Jira I created a bunch of custom console scripts make all changes via https://github.com/go-jira/jira .

nickcw• 3 years ago

From https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/issues/142

2023 is going to be the "Make or Break" year. I ultimately need to determine if the project is going to continue. To date, it's nowhere near sustainable. The income doesn't cover the cost of the project, meaning that it's not only unable to allow me to pay for my cost of living, but I continue to rack up debt, borrowing money, to keep the project functional.
This isn't new information if you've followed the over 1,200 announcements I've made since Sept 2018. The data is available should you wish to look at the GitHub Sponsorships and do the simple math required to calculate income from Udemy. It would be great for the project to keep going. I'm hopeful, but more than hope's required to keep the project going.

So if you like this project and want to see it around in the future, please support it.

Github sponsors is probably the best place: https://github.com/sponsors/PySimpleGUI

flatline• 3 years ago

I worked with a non-software team that used this to build a UI about two years ago. It’s great to spin up something quickly, and worked well for a team that didn’t have much UI experience - to a point. It becomes very hard to maintain and navigate as soon as any complexity comes in - much harder than Qt, Winforms, or Swing. The styling was lackluster. Maybe it’s improved in that time, but I think its place is quick one-off UIs and rapid prototyping.

deafpolygon4• 3 years ago

I love this project. Enough said, we need more of this approach to software development. Software dev is about helping people solve problems.

sourcecodeplz• 3 years ago

I like this part:

> Want to share your PySimpleGUI program with friends and family that don't have Python installed on their computer? Try the GUI front-end for PyInstaller that you'll find in the psgcompiler project.

kushie• 3 years ago

i haven't used this pyinstaller gui, but for my purposes (internal python 3.8) i just set up a batch script for each project to have a single command to make my executable. i've also had to do some wrestling with pyinstaller for specific features, not sure how much the pyinstaller gui helps iron those issues out.

hanniabu• 3 years ago

I really wish this had a more modern default style

_dmn72• 3 years ago

As a developer for a Python GUI application [1], I think the biggest problem with using Python for desktop applications is the packaging. All existing tooling for creating a distributable binary either stops working or starts to require nontrivial hacks once you have more than a few dependencies. Even popular packages have issues. You get cryptic missing hidden import problems and missing data files that you didn't know were ever needed. Some dynamic module loading also stops working once they are brought outside of the normal python environment, which is the case if you use PyInstaller or cx_freeze. I'm not sure what can really be done here. Maybe Python needs to propose a standardized way to package standalone programs like Java's jars that only depends on the interpreter.

1. https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

networked2• 3 years ago

Python has zipapps (https://peps.python.org/pep-0441/), which are standardized and similar to JARs. You can build a zipapp that includes your application's dependencies using a tool like shiv or PEX, only with binary extensions the artifacts are still per-platform: https://github.com/linkedin/shiv#gotchas.

I recommend users to install my Python programs with pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx). I think it is the best option when the audience is at all technical. pipx makes such a big difference for managing Python applications. It avoids the version conflicts of `pip install --user` and the pain of manually creating per-application venvs. In general, it provides a reasonable user experience. Because of this user-friendliness, I can recommend pipx as the primary installation method and expect people to succeed at installing the program with it. (I don't see issues about pipx installation in the trackers of projects that recommend it.) My programs have binary dependencies but no GUI.

raffraffraff• 3 years ago

Pipx still breaks. I tried to use something a few days ago that had been working until a month ago and it failed with some useless generic python error that I can't remember. I looked at the code in the /usr/bin/thing and it was just a wrapper. After following the rabbit around I just uninstall pipx, install it again, and then reinstall the thing that I was originally trying to use. No idea what broke it, perhaps a python update or something. The 'dead' version is probably still hanging around in my home directory taking up space somewhere.

Python absolutely sucks in this regard and I don't think there is a permanent solution. Except give python a compiler that can spit out binaries and libraries. I wish nim was 100% python code compatible.

Compiled binaries with shared libs work fine as long as they come from an OS package repository. Statically compiled binaries work almost everywhere. But a script that needs a bag of other specifically versioned scripts needs to live in it's own (sometimes impossible) world. Hell, I've even had a single pip install on a clean system fail because two dependencies of the module I was installing wanted different versions of some common dependency. Gah, burn it with fire.

I'm always amazed at the Windows ecosystem. I can download something that was built in the 90s and happily run it in wine.

bitwize• 3 years ago

This looks cool and seems about on par with Tcl/Tk w.r.t. rapid GUI prototyping.

PysimpleGUI

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