5.4. A Brief Tour of Other GUIs

We hope to eventually develop an independent chapter on general GUI development that makes use of the abundant number of graphical toolkits that exist under Python, but alas, that is for the future. As a proxy, we would like to present a single, simple GUI application written by using four of the more popular toolkits: Tix (Tk Interface eXtensions), Pmw (Python MegaWidgets Tkinter extension), wxPython (Python binding to wxWidgets), and PyGTK (Python binding to GTK+). The final example demonstrates how to use Tile/Ttk—in both Python 2 and 3. You can find links to more information and/or download these toolkits in the reference section at the end of this chapter.

The Tix module is already available in the Python Standard Library. You must download the others, which are third party. Since Pmw is just an extension to Tkinter, it is the easiest to install (just extract it into your site packages). wxPython and PyGTK involve the download of more than one file and building (unless you opt for the Win32 versions for which binaries are usually available). Once the toolkits are installed and verified, we can begin. Rather than just sticking with the widgets we’ve already seen in this chapter, we’d like to introduce a few more complex widgets for these examples.