I was wondering if I could install a GUI designer for your IDE that you’re using. Then I could make a program starting with a Form and just drag and drop controls on it and create event handlers and start coding.
Like Visual Basic or Visual C#.
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GUI designers are specific to a GUI framework. Search web or stackoverflow for specific frameworks.
I’ve located like wxPython and pyqt6 but don’t have the faintest idea of how to install them into Wing Pro, which is the IDE I use for Python.
If anyone knows a video on YouTube that talks about how to install wxWidgets on your computer and then how to configure it to work with your Python IDE, please post.
This is really hard and confusing.
I’m really only a hobbyist and there is no one where I live that could help.
Tim,
You might be interested in more simple gui libraries.
I’ve used the following with good success:
Pysimplegui - easy to layout your window, with lists as rows.
You probably should decide what set of widgets you want to use first.
I tried Glade for a while: Glade Interface Designer - Wikipedia
…but before long, I decided I’d rather do widget layout manually.
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What operating system are you using?
Qt Designer.
I’m using Windows 10. I will look up the PySimple GUI. Actually most of the videos I’ve seen on YouTube in which someone is demonstrating how to make a simple Windows program, they are writing the code by hand. They’re not using a GUI designer.
Wonder why.
Probably because, in today’s modern world, drag-and-drop UI designers are actually mostly fairly bad. At best, they are easy for trivially-simple UIs (which would be easy to build in code too), and extremely annoying for more complicated UIs; at worst, they force everything into a pixel precision that looks awful if the system default font isn’t the same one that the designer intended.
Rule-based UIs are far better than pixel-placement UIs, but they are tricky to build with drag-and-drop. It’s way easier to define them with code.
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In the sea of drag-and-drop GUI makers, I think Qt Designer is fairly good, though. I’d much rather have newbies go through it than manually typing tkinter code, which has a fairly counterintuitive API and minimal documentation. You can literally craft a very decent-looking GUI and turn it into Python code in less than an hour.
pysimplegui has a ton of examples to get you going fast. You’ll see that you can imagine the layout, just by looking at the code.
Text-based layouts allow for easy revision history and copy-pasting examples super easy.
Tim,
in case the IDE you have in mind is VS Code, there’s abstra. it’s an extension that has the drag and drop widgets you mentioned, that connect to Python code. very much like visual basic.
qt designer is good, but looks a bit dated imo! cheers
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I’ve often wondered why some people have said that using Python in Visual Studio is not that good, but Visual Studio Code is better. If you can give me any feedback on that, please do.
Thanks,
Tim