After years of admonition discouraging me, I’m using Python for a Windows GUI app over my usual C#/MAUI. I’m much more familiar with Python and the whole VS ecosystem is just so heavy for lightweight tasks. I started with tkinter but found it super clunky for interactions I needed heavily, like on field change, but learning QT seemed like more of a lift than I was interested in. (Maybe a skill issue on both fronts?) Grabbed wxglade and drag-and-dropped an interface with wxpython that only has one external dependency installable with pip, is way more convenient than writing xaml by hand, and ergonomically feels pretty pythonic compared to QT. Glad to see more work going into the windows runtime because I’ll probably be leaning on it more.
I really like the Python + Qt/pyside combination. I can whip together a rough GUI using QtCreator and then write the app logic in Python super quickly.
I’m sure it would be a goto if I made gui apps more regularly, because it’s clearly the more robust solution. So far wxglade is great for a drag-and-drop designer and the code is just enough closer to the regular Python way of doing things that it’s one less thing to learn.
If anyone stumbles upon this in a search for Python UI libaries, also check out Textural. It's a TUI setup that can also be displayed in web browsers because it uses CSS for styling. At least for fairly uncomplicated UIs, it seems pretty simple, and has good event hook support. It has some features like event bubbling, and reactivity, which smack of JS front-end framework workflows on the data side, for better or worse.
Wait until you see ImGui bindings for Python [1]. It’s immediate mode instead of retained mode like Tkinter/Qt/Wx. It might not be what you’d want if you’re shipping a thick client to customers, but for internal tooling it’s awesome.
imgui.text(f"Counter = {counter}")
if imgui.button("increment counter"):
counter += 1
_, name = imgui.input_text("Your name?", name)
imgui.text(f"Hello {name}!")
ImGui has been on my watchlist for years and recently I finally had an application which seemed I could put it to use. It essentially delivered on all points I hoped it would. After decades in software, it doesn't happen often anymore I'm impressed but now I was.
This looks like it would be perfect for the internal user that really just needs to run a shell script with options who’s in the “technical enough to follow instructions faithfully, not technical enough to comfortably/reliably use the command line” demographic.
