On 2020-09-03, Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 9/3/20 1:17 PM, Grant Edwards wrote: >> On 2020-09-03, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> [...] >>> >>> Is pygobject the replacement for pygtk? >> >> It seems to be. I've started porting my pygtk app, and it's going >> pretty smoothly. I've already got my two custom widgets working. >> Oddly, the main module provided by the gobject package is called "gi". > > It stands for "gobject introspection."
That's what I (later) suspected. > The nice thing about the gi module is it can wrap any gobject-based > library, not just GTK+ proper. So if someone made a custom widget > in Vala, for example, you could access it via gi. It's a neat > idea. My only problem with it is the resulting Python API is not > always as pythonic as pygtk code was. I noticed that right away. In pygtk, most methods (e.g. .pack_start) had named arguments with well chosen defaults. The vast majority of the time, I only supplied one argument for the pack_start() call. With gi's implementation of pack_start, there are no named parameters: they're all positional. You have to specify all four of them every time, even if the last three are False,False,0 95% of the time. And the lack of names makes it impossible to figure out from reading the application source code what those last three actually mean. [The first argument is obvious in context.] I assume that difference is because pygtk was hand-written and gi is built auto-magically using SWIG or something like that? > I can't think of any specific examples at the moment, however. It's > pretty much good enough to not care too much. For native Linux apps I definitely prefer Gtk. The other choices are * WxPython - It's bigger and far more complex than pygtk/gi and the extra complexity doesn't ever seem to buy me anything except MS-Windows compatibility [which did matter for a few of the apps I used to maintain]. The last time I looked into Gtk on Windows, it didn't sound usable, but that was many years ago. * PyQt -- I run Gtk-centric Linux systems, and the second you try to use one Qt widget, it always seems to pull in hundreds of packages that take a week to build. * Tkinter -- It's ugly on Linux (yea, I know there are supposed to be ways to fix that, but they never seem to work for me). All of the tkinter apps I maintain all seem to have one or two widgets with behavior that's counter-intuitive. When you bundle a trivial tkinter app (e.g. with cx-freeze), it ends up huge unless you put in a great deal of work manually excluding stuff you don't need. Back when there was a gtk version of Wireshark, I usually didn't have any Qt stuff installed at all. I'm still trying to get _that_ knife pulled out of my back. How dare somebody give me (for free) something tremendously valuable and useful in a slightly different flavor than I would prefer. ;) > Similar arguments can be made against PyQt as well. Especially with > PyQt the end result feels a bit like writing C++ with a python > syntax. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
