Hi all, I'm a recent, belated convert from Perl. I work in a physics lab and have been using Python to automate a lot of measurement equipment lately. It works fabulously for this purpose. Recently I've wanted to start writing GUIs for some of my programs, for data visualization and to make the programs easier to use for some of my co-workers.
So far I've experimented with two Python GUI toolkits: Tkinter and PyGTK. I've had some issues with each: * PyGTK - not very "pythonic", in my opinion. Have to use get_ and set_ methods rather than properties. Have to write ugly things like textview.insert(textview.get_end_iter(), ...) to append text to a text buffer. No useful doc strings, which makes experimenting with new widgets in IPython a huge pain. The toolkit feels very "heavyweight". I don't want to write an XML file and an "action group" just to make a piddly little menubar with 10 items. I'm an avid Gnome fan, and love the professionalness and completeness of GTK, but PyGTK seems frustratingly C-like compared to the wonderfully designed high-level abstractions I've come to love in Python! * TkInter - Seems easy to learn, and better for quick "lightweight" GUIs. I wrote a complete working instrument GUI in less than a day of figuring things out. Not very Pythonic in terms of creating and modifying widgets. No factory functions to quickly create menu items. My biggest problem with Tkinter is that it is very unreliable under Cygwin: programs freeze and slow intermittently and the tkMessageDialog stock dialog boxes show no visible text. So, is there another toolkit I should be looking at? Having something that can run easily on Cygwin and native Windows is a priority so that I can quickly move programs to new measurement computers. I like GTK a lot and Tk is growing on me too.. are there any higher-level "wrapper" toolkits for GTK and Tk? Thanks for any advice! Dan Lenski University of Maryland -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
