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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

Being inexperienced with modern Python, that leads me to ask, what's the story with GUI work on Python? Are there any good libraries?

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Tk from python is pretty damn convenient, being as it's always there. Not the most modern toolkit for sure, but always being there is a pretty compelling feature for some GUI projects.

Since it came up, Tkinter's drag and drop story is pretty grim too.

I've used Tkinter with python to make a whole bunch of quick utilities (sync tools for non-techies, XML editing stuff for file applications which lack needed tools, etc.) and think it's very under appreciated.

FWIW, ubuntu python3 does not install Tk by default.

Don't use system python. Use a virtualenv and install your own python. I would expect system python to only install what is needed.

I think aidenn0 was just replying to the claim that "it's always there".

It's not always there. Like it's not there on MSYS2.

My limited experience with PyQt3 says it isn't horrible and seems to cover most bases.

Qt3?? Qt4 came out in 2005 and Qt5 in 2013. So Qt3 and 'modern Python' don't seem to have much in common.

Thanks - I actually meant PyQt5! I don't know where PyQt3 came from... probably related to only finding info on specific functions often leading me to Qt3 docs.

I seem to recall the download is humongous?

What do you consider humongous? On my Windows Machine it's 100MB (assuming I'm counting the right directories).

Yeah that's beyond humongous, that's just ridiculous. :-) I was imagining it was more like 60MB.

On which platform/hardware is 100MB ridiculous? I was using it on my Raspberry Pi with a 32GB MicroSD card which cost ~10€ for the High Endurance version (officially supported by SanDisk for Linux/Pi) i.e. 100MB is peanuts.

Also the difference between 60MB and 100MB isn't huge, so using the word ridiculous is IMO a bit over-dramatic.

On whatever platform. Requiring a user to download and install a 100MB+ framework just to show a basic GUI is just ridiculous. Even Sublime is 33 MB and I see that as bloated, and that's including its separate copy of Python itself...

Maybe it's because PyQt is a lot more than just a basic GUI[0].

> PyQt is one of the most popular Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform C++ framework.

And why are you comparing an editor to a GUI framework? Or is there a GUI framework also called Sublime?

[0]: https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt

GTK works great with Python (like with most scripting languages really).

Turtle

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