---
author: einar
comments: true
date: 2007-01-06 10:13:08+00:00
layout: post
slug: a-newbie-approach-to-guis
title: A newbie approach to GUIs
wordpress_id: 150
categories:
- General
- Linux
---

In the past two days, aside studying the Python basics, I've been looking to find a decent GUI toolset to develop user interfaces in Python.

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[Tkinter](http://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter) of course is the first that comes to mind. I've been experimenting a bit and I can say it's probably the easiest to use, but, at least with my current level of knowledge, there are some drawbacks. The first gripe I have is that everything (as far as I know) needs to run into a single class, since I don't see a quick way to use the result values produced by the callbacks (aside setting them as attributes of their class or declare some variables global). Second, until Tk8.5 is out, its font rendering on Linux is **ugly**.

I also tried out [wxPyton](http://www.wxpython.org/) but it seems too complex for my current level of knowledge. [PythonCard](http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/) should be a layer over that to simplify things, but as far as I could see I need to study more before approaching it.

Last but not least, there is [PyQt](http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/index.php), which is the one I am most interested in. Sadly, documentation is quite lacking and the only up to date book on PyQt 4 will be out this autumn. There was a PyQt3 book hosted on opendocs.org, but that domain doesn't currently resolve (and as I found out, it's a 2001 book, rather old).
The bottom line is: I need to study more of the language to a GUI toolset (sorry folks, but I'm not even considering GTK and its Python bindings). Hopefully a book or two will be out along the way.
