[Python-ideas] A GUI for beginners and experts alike

[Paul Moore]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 at 15:53, Mike Barnett <mike_barnett at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Can a few of you with the vast amount of GUI experience you have, spend 5 minutes and run one of the examples?

I don't have a "vast" amount of GUI experience. But nevertheless I
gave it a go. It took less than 5 minutes (which is good).

> This will get you started:
>
> pip install PySimpleGUI

Worked.

> Then copy and paste a Recipe from the Cookbook.
>
> https://pysimplegui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook/

I went for the simple GUI form. It worked pretty much as expected. The
code looks quite nice.

> For someone with a dev environment running, it’s a 2 minute exercise.  It will make for more focused comments. I’m asking that it actually be tried

Agreed, it was simple to use, and pick up a canned example.

> because I don’t think anything like it has been proposed as a GUI framework.

I don't know if that's true, there's a lot of GUI frameworks and I
certainly can't say I've tried all of them. This looks nice for simple
usages, and would certainly be useful as a project on PyPI (like it is
at the moment). I doubt it's mature enough for the stdlib, and I'm
certain it's not stable enough (yet) for the stdlib - you'll want to
make changes, add features, etc, and once it's in the stdlib that's
going to be a lot harder. What's the rush?

As far as things I think I'd like to see (and these are just off the
top of my head, I've done nothing more than I said above):

1. More documentation - reference docs specifically. I don't see
documentation of the call signature for sg.Text, for example.
2. Advanced features - how would I extend it if I have a need that it
doesn't cover? For example, a canvas object or an image?
3. It doesn't seem to use native widgets (the buttons have a
non-standard look on my Windows PC).

Don't feel like you need to do anything about these comments - I
rarely if ever use a GUI library, and I've no idea if I'd use this one
in future, but if you want "focused comments" beyond "it looks neat
and seems like a fine project to go onto PyPI, but I don't think it's
necessarily something that should go in the stdlib", then those were
what I thought of off the cuff.

Hope this is useful,
Paul