I'm a Tcl/Tk developer who has been working, slowly, at learning Python, in part because Python has better support for certain kinds of applications that I want to develop than Tcl/Tk does. Naturally, I thought that I would use Tkinter as the GUI for these programs. However, in doing research into GUI development techniques, sample code, and showcase applications, what has struck me is how little sophisticated GUI development seems to be done in Tkinter as compared to, say, wxPython. I've found plenty of tutorials on how to do basic GUI stuff with Tkinter, but that stuff pretty much ends with the core Tk widgets (buttons, entry fields, scrollbars, and menu items).
Coming from Tcl/Tk, where there are a huge number of extension packages to enhance the Tk widgets and which allow you to make really polished GUI's, I'm struck mainly by how little of this stuff has made it over into Tkinter/Python. For instance, I've developed several Tcl applications that use the core Tk widgets, the Tile theming package, the Bwidget set (great tree widget and listbox, which allows you to embed images), and tablelist (an extremely flexible muti-column listbox display). I've found Python wrappers for some of this stuff, but almost no documentation on how to use them, and very little in the way of actual applications making use of them--which is itself a red flag. And most of the pure-Python extension stuff that I've found, such as Python megawidgets, is pretty dated/ugly and lags far behind the comparable stuff on the Tcl side. Am I better off biting the bullet and learning wxPython--a different GUI paradigm to go with the new language I'm trying to learn? I had hoped to reduce my learning curve, but I'm very concerned that I simply can't do what I want to do with Tkinter. What do other Tkinter developers think? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
