Gooey: Turn almost any Python command line program into a full GUI application | Hacker News Reader

Gooey: Turn almost any Python command line program into a full GUI application

github.com

769 pointslsferreira42118 comments

Hey, what the -- this is my thing. ^_^ What's it doing at the top of HN?

A quick reply to some of the comments about argparse. Gooey is super old at this point. Argparse was a solid choice at the time when Gooey started. These days, Gooey itself speaks in JSON and is decoupled from argparse itself. However, argparse remains the main "blessed" interface (mostly because nobody else has built a different one).

Some fun FYIs: You can also invoke any arbitrary executable[0], not just python, which is pretty handy.

Re: last commit being 2 years ago. It gets harder to justify working for free on niche software as you get older and priorities change :( If it's any consolation, I DO feel guilty all the time. I have no idea why, but where I live, there's "GOOEY" graffiti tagged all over the place, so it's a nice ever-present reminder of the issue tracker that's currently going unloved. haha.

[0] https://chriskiehl.com/article/gooey-as-a-universal-frontend

This is a really cool idea. I love interface disconnected from APIs. We have so many annoyances these days because applications can't be programmatically controlled. Honestly, I'd like to see legislation saying all application functionality needs to have APIs.

I would not like to have to concern myself with exposing government-compliant APIs when coding any arbitrary tool...the free market can reward good development.

> the free market can reward good development

ha ha

No way, especially because all the people taking most market-business-related decisions (eg which software to buy) are not tech-oriented. If we had more power on these decisions, that would mean that development, and even advertising of products, would be closer to what the parent comment suggest. But alas.

> the free market can reward good development.

Markets cannot regulate nuanced behavior like this. Microsoft is a trivial example of anti-user practices and generally garbage design nonetheless being adopted due to their tremendous efforts of corporate propaganda and scaremongering the decision makers about their products.

> Honestly, I'd like to see legislation saying all application functionality needs to have APIs.

The security implications of this give me heart palpitations.

The opportunities for abuse are manifold.

This is true, but the abuse would still be possible today if someone is reverse engineering software or talking to servers where everything is over APIs anyway. I'm talking about local interface decoupled with a local API from implementation. The problem today is that programmers can't compose or build software on top of other software they have.

> I'm talking about local interface decoupled with a local API from implementation.

To expose this "local API" usefully, you must either:

1. Share memory with other processes (new attack vector), or 2. Listen on some kind of network or native socket for messages and authn+authz the commands that come through it based on some security protocol (new attack vector).

The value proposition of an API is to allow control and data flow between an application and some external entity. It seems to me that it has security implications by definition.

Maybe think of incentives rather than legislation

I think legislation demanding most tools have an API would be a good thing. Not 'tho shalt expose a REST endpoint'. But instead something like 'every operation a user can do with this tool, they also need to be able to trigger with an interface that is programable, and that interface needs to be documented'.

Saying 'our programable interface is the gui, use autohotkey' is fine, as long as you properly document all click regions.

This would be a massive productivity boost to anyone using such tools. It would also be great for disabled people.

Hey! Cool project! I have a question: why do you dump out sys.argv to a local file in the CWD? [0] tmp.txt is hardly a unique name… or am I missing something?

[0] https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey/blob/be4b11b8f27f500e732...

Seems like it's potentially used for debugging, especially given that pycharm apparently appends additional params when invoking a new process (as noted in the comment at the top of the file).

Argparse is still a pretty solid choice, because it's so ubiquitous and well documented and fairly easy. Typer and Click are both very nice, with some good ergonomics, but I find Typer's "tutorial" style documentation to be rather hard to search to find answers to things like "What arguments does Typer.App() take?"

I have a program I'm working on right now that does user-initiated argument parsing, and argparse is a great fit for it. I'd love to have a text-based UI as an option to drop users into, but Textualize requires Click (IIRC), and using Textual directly in my code to create the UI I've spent hours on and had absolutely no luck even getting started.

While Typer looks nice, I found it to be annoying. It outputs everything depending on the width of your terminal emulator with spaces instead of newlines. Not sure who thought that was a good idea, but try copy pasting any output of it in any chat or anywhere that is not the same width in chars as your terminal emulator. The output becomes complete shit and unreadable. The second thing is, that it forces you to adhere to its paradigm of being a global mutable state object, instrad of being passed around neatly like argsparse, which makes code less understandable and tests needlessly more complicated.

Overall I have found it to be very much not worth it adding typer as a dependency. Hard pass.

On the other hand, I've switched to using Typer for most of my argument parsing because it's not an object I have to pass around. It lets me have the arguments co-located with the code, which is convenient. Especially for more complicated argument parsing, like one of my commands for our deploy process which has maybe 15 sub-commands, that sort of parsing with argparse is kind of a nightmare.

The solution to this kind of issue is something like parameters (See for example https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Paramete...). They are also thread safe. One can easily set them in tests without having to mock things. I am not sure it is possible to even have something like this in Python. Have not seen it anywhere in Python.

> Passing arguments to functions is thread-safe, but that soon becomes tedious when there’s more than a few or when they need to pass down through several layers of calls before reaching the point they should affect. Introducing a new setting to existing code is often easier with a parameter object than adding arguments.

But also, if you really wanted to, you could set the argsparse object to a global variable and then import it everywhere else. So that is not a limitation.

My issue with argparse isn't that it's not global, it's that you have to create sub-parsers for multiple commands, and then add arguments to those subparsers. Those parsers are all typically defined in a central location, but copying arguments between those parsers as I define new commands can get them jumbled up because the sub-parser comes along with the argument:

    sub1 = [create subparser]
    sub1.add_argument('-x')
    sub2 = [create subparser]

If I copy "sub1.add_argument" and put it under "sub2", and forget to change "sub1" to "sub2", it is a hard to track down bug. I've had this happen a lot as the parser gets more complex.

Typer completely eliminates this potential bug, because the arguments are defined as type annotations in the sub-command function itself.

Gee if only there was a way to reuse logic within a program.

> arguments are defined as type annotations in the sub-command function itself

So you duplicate logic in your type definitions instead of as instructions. Whatever makes you happy i guess.

Notably, argparse is way faster than click/typer. If you just need a few —options it’s probably preferable.

Argparse also does not require tens of external libraries.

That right there is the real winner. I already get queasy when my dependency list gets too long. Invoking an extra collection for what is mostly developer quality of life is not a trade-off I like to make.

Graffiti?? Where do you live? Any pics of it?

Presumably Seattle; Gooey is a prolific tagger. This appears to be their instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gooeygue/

> These days, Gooey itself speaks in JSON and is decoupled from argparse itself.

This sounds cool. I saw the headline and before clicking anything, my first thought was "bet this heavily depends on argparse", so this is surprising - in a very nice way.

I'm a hardcore getopt fan, mostly because I believe the developer's convenience is nowhere as important as the convenience of the user, and the user shouldn't need to care what programming language or option parsing library the developer chose. argparse, Click, Go's flag/X11-style, and many other similar libraries break conventions that are ingrained in half a century's collective muscle memory.

But with a layer in the middle, it sounds like you can eat your cake and have it too.

> Gooey is super old at this point.

It's only super old because you abandoned it (and I don't mean to be judgemental, it is what it is). Worse yet, no viable alternative has shown up to replace it nor either of its forks gained traction.

No its super old cause it was created a long time ago? Why dont you go update it or make a free up to date version? Why do people act like software creators owe the world something?

And Python itself was released in 2000! No wonder everyone has abandoned it these days, it's ancient!

Thank you for your work, awesome software.

I'm wondering if there's a way to use python-fire instead of argpraser with gooey?

Shouldn't this be qualified with "argparse-based"?

Argparse is good for simple stuff but there are many Click based CLI's and a lot of popular CLI libraries build on top of Click. There are also other Python CLI tools that aren't built on argparse or Click, though I will say that these two are probably the most popular ones.

Is this confirmed to work with Click? I only see references to argparse. I would go so far to say, if the answer is no, that "almost any" is a flat out lie, and a much more accurate title would be "Turn almost any argparse-based Python command line program into a full GUI application".

Also, the last substantial commit was over two years ago. This isn't itself a bad thing, but given the open issue count does not really signal confidence in the project.

Otherwise it is a cool project. I would like to see more of this - it's one of those neat force multipliers, as referenced in the README, that some enterprising person could implement as a CLI and then share their automation for the rest of the nontechnical office in an easy way. Kind of like how Access did the same thing for DB's. Like Access, you would butt up against limitations once you started to introduce some level of size or complexity, but it could be "good enough" for a lot of small office use cases.

I used it for exactly this in my previous role. I automated a lot of tasks and built tools for my previous team. Most of them weren't Python programmers so I used gooey to create simple GUI's on top of my scripts. It worked really well.

Mind you give some examples? curious.

One does not need to be a $lang programmer to use a CLI tool written in $lang.

I'm curious about the deficiencies you see in argparse... my bias is to minimize 3rd party dependencies ...

I was genuinely seeking feedback. I use argparse regularly. I have found it somewhat difficult to use when creating nested subparsers. That Click is part of the The Pallets Project gives me more confidence in it being maintained indefinitely, but ...

What can't you do with argparse exactly?

Gooey: Turn almost any Python command line program into a GUI application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27490291 - June 2021 (115 comments)

Gooey: Turn command line programs into GUI applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218785 - Aug 2014 (74 comments)

I wish that the OS and shell had better insight on how to run programs without need for specific library parsing libraries.

I'd love to see programs communicate through a typed JSON/proto format that shed enough details to make this more independent, and get useful shell command structuring/completion or full blown GUIs from simply introspecting the expected input and output types.

Today it seems that the best you can get is still made out of carefully placed straws as programs need to export completion files to many shells, there's vastly different styles for flags across programs and parsing libraries, and obviously, there's no GUIs around.

Kind of like some generic gRPC interchange/CLI API with native OS support? Something like that could be neat. I conjecture the main problem with gRPC is that a lot of developers (myself included) find dealing with it a bit unwieldy compared to more native (by native I mean in-language) solutions.

If you look into IPC primitives in each OS you can find goodies that do expose structured metadata about what interfaces are available and how they can be called. D-Bus, sd-bus, COM, Binder, to name a few.

It’s just that the tooling around it isn’t as easily exposed and they aren’t tailored for on-demand launch via command line. If the shell treated such as a more first class citizen, good results may come out.

Another big problem is portability, if you designed your app with sdbus, it’s not going to work on a non systemd distro, even less on Windows. What’s needed is a standardized abstraction layer on top.

Now you have a thing called powershell. Though as more serious answer plan9 was probably the only OS that really tried this.

Is there anything good Plan 9 hasn’t tried? I feel like every time I hear about a good OS idea, someone brings up Plan 9. Haha.

> I'd love to see programs communicate through a typed JSON/proto format that shed enough details to make this more independent, and get useful shell command structuring/completion or full blown GUIs from simply introspecting the expected input and output types.

You should try PowerShell. It's basically Microsoft's .NET ecosystem molded into an interactive command line. I'm not entirely sure if PoweShell can make full use of the static types that build up its core, but its ability to exchange objects in the command line is almost unmatched.

On Linux you can use `jc` (https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) combined with `jq` (https://jqlang.github.io/jq/) to glue together command lines, but that's still two extra steps you need to deal with compared to PS's built-in capabilities.

I don't have a windows machine and I don't plan on having one.

I didn't know of `jc`, but it seems that using nushell (https://github.com/nushell/nushell) gets you a better experience.

PowerShell is available on macOS and Linux as well (source on Github: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell). It may not be as well-integrated with things like system services management, but the language still works well. You can still use all the command line tools you're used to on Linux, of course.

nushell does look interesting, though the lack of a .deb repository does put it pretty low on my to-do list.

I sometimes find GUIs equivalent to comfort-food as you can just stroll through a gui interface without lot of cognitive overload that may come from a rarely used CLI.

A bit tangential to current discussion, but i came across CUDATEXT editor a few months ago here which provides a single file python API to let me use arbitrary GUI elements like MENU, INPUTS etc which editor is itself using. I currently generate my blog from editor itself with configuration done through these simple GUI elements.