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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

True... but the crazy thing is the other options aren't hugely better. GTK has poor OSX support, while QT is massive and the bindings situation is still unclear - it's workable for building an app, but would you want to have it included in the default install? Kivy is neat but comparatively immature and doesn't have native theming. WxWidgets can look good but doesn't seem to have Python3 support.

I was really surprised by this actually - I wanted to create some simple GUI apps and assumed there would be something clean, small, and modern to replace TK... but nope. And all the documentation (including for python tk) is pretty terrible. The most realistic suggestion I've seen is... write you GUI in HTML and Javascript and use python for the backend server. Not a great situation when the best way to write a good looking GUI for Python is basically not to use Python...

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https://github.com/pybee/toga

IMHO, it's rather amazing, though it needs to be developed further, to support more widgets, remove bugs, etc. Sadly it did not gain much traction after release. Maybe due to not comprehensive documentation and few nasty bugs in the beginning.

I would give this library a go if I would be developing GUI application in python, though apart making few exercises, I have not used it a lot.

Major pros, that it's in python, so debugging is easy, and what is not covered with documentation, can be uncovered also. Another thing you can simply install it with pip.

>GTK has poor OSX support

Is it really that bad ?

I was really impressed the last time I did GTK+ (was a linux app small content pipeline frontend for designers) at how fast I got things done, the docs were simple and to the point [1], Glade was buggy but still usable (I had to reload after some time because it would get progressively slower as I would add/remove elements - probably a leak somewhere) I got an app with complex tree view/table/filtering etc. running within two days from 0 previous GTK+ experience.

I liked that it was a straight GUI toolkit - reminded me of VB - just create GUI elements with RAD tool and hook up callbacks in good old python - no fancy MVC, IOT learning QML and w/e. - exactly the kind of thing that lets you do apps of this size fast IMO.

[1] https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

From what I could see, the Quartz backend isn't complete, and generally Mac doesn't seem to be a high priority. Some apps like Inkscape still require to install X11 for mac (which is slow, and makes for a very clunky ux), except for experimental builds with GTK native. In short, not really a plug-and-play experience.

A Qt IDE would be fine. Sure it is rather large - something like 30 MB unzipped for a "Hello world" using QML, though 20 MB of that is Unicode data which can be cut down, and non-QML apps are smaller. But it's much nicer than Qt.

The IDE doesn't have to be written in Python (e.g. PyCharm isn't and that is probably the best Python IDE available at the moment).

In the sentence "But it's much nicer than Qt.", what does "it" refer to?

Ooops that was a typo. Probably should have said GTK (or TK).

QML?

That matches my experiences when I was looking at desktop GUI toolkits for another project. I understand it though given most things are web or mobile these days.

A recent poll I had on the TkDocs site showed documentation is definitely the big issue for what people are trying to accomplish with Tk.

> while QT is massive and the bindings situation is still unclear - it's workable for building an app, but would you want to have it included in the default install?

Qt's like < 50 M. We aren't living in 1995. It's bindings aren't just "workable"; they are pretty good.

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