Programming Python, Second Edition

Python GUI Development Options

Before we start wading into the Tkinter pond, let’s begin with some perspective on Python GUI options in general. Because Python has proven to be such a good match for GUI work, this domain has seen much activity in recent years. In fact, although Tkinter is the most widely used GUI toolkit in Python, there is a variety of ways to program user interfaces in Python today. Some are specific to Windows or X Windows,^[49] some are cross-platform solutions, and all have followings and strong points all their own. To be fair to all the alternatives, here is a brief inventory of GUI toolkits available to Python programmers as I write these words:

Tkinter (shipped with Python)

An open-source, portable GUI library, used as the de facto standard for GUI development in Python. Tkinter makes it easy to build simple GUIs quickly, and can be straightforwardly augmented with larger component frameworks in Python. Python scripts that use Tkinter to build GUIs run portably on Windows, X Windows (Unix), and Macintosh, and display a native look-and-feel on each of these. The underlying Tk library used by Tkinter is a standard in the open source world at large, and is also used by the Perl and Tcl scripting languages.

wxPython (http://wxpython.org)

An open-source Python interface for wxWindows -- a portable GUI class framework originally written to be used from the C++ programming language. The wxPython system is an extension module that wraps wxWindows classes. This library ...