25.6. Other Graphical User Interface Packages

Major cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Unix-like) GUI toolkits are available for Python:

See also

PyGObject [https://live.gnome.org/PyGObject]

provides introspection bindings for C libraries using GObject [https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/stable/]. One of these libraries is the GTK+ 3 [http://www.gtk.org/] widget set. GTK+ comes with many more widgets than Tkinter provides. An online Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial [http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/] is available.

PyGTK [http://www.pygtk.org/] provides bindings for an older version of the library, GTK+ 2. It provides an object oriented interface that is slightly higher level than the C one. There are also bindings to GNOME [http://www.gnome.org]. An online tutorial [http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/index.html] is available.

PyQt [http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/intro]

PyQt is a sip-wrapped binding to the Qt toolkit. Qt is an extensive C++ GUI application development framework that is available for Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. sip is a tool for generating bindings for C++ libraries as Python classes, and is specifically designed for Python. The PyQt3 bindings have a book, GUI Programming with Python: QT Edition [http://www.commandprompt.com/community/pyqt/] by Boudewijn Rempt. The PyQt4 bindings also have a book, Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt [http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html], by Mark Summerfield.

PySide [http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide]

is a newer binding to the Qt toolkit, provided by Nokia. Compared to PyQt, its licensing scheme is friendlier to non-open source applications.

wxPython [http://www.wxpython.org]

wxPython is a cross-platform GUI toolkit for Python that is built around the popular wxWidgets [http://www.wxwidgets.org/] (formerly wxWindows) C++ toolkit. It provides a native look and feel for applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix systems by using each platform’s native widgets where ever possible, (GTK+ on Unix-like systems). In addition to an extensive set of widgets, wxPython provides classes for online documentation and context sensitive help, printing, HTML viewing, low-level device context drawing, drag and drop, system clipboard access, an XML-based resource format and more, including an ever growing library of user-contributed modules. wxPython has a book, wxPython in Action [http://www.manning.com/rappin/], by Noel Rappin and Robin Dunn.

PyGTK, PyQt, and wxPython, all have a modern look and feel and more widgets than Tkinter. In addition, there are many other GUI toolkits for Python, both cross-platform, and platform-specific. See the GUI Programming [https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming] page in the Python Wiki for a much more complete list, and also for links to documents where the different GUI toolkits are compared.