What's the best GUI toolkit in Python,Tkinter,wxPython,QT,GTK?

[Dave Cook]

On 2005-03-27, Tom <myata99 at tom.com> wrote:

> 1) Portable to Windows, Unix-like platforms, and the Macintosh;
> 2) Powerful, GUI is very beautiful ;
> 3) Efficiency of development is high;
>
> What's the best, Tkinter, wxPython, QT, GTK or other?

Don't forget Swing and SWT via Jython.  Of course that brings with it all
the joys and sorrows of Java.

GTK on the Mac (OS X) requires installing and running an X server (an X
server is included on Apple's OS X install discs, but not installed by
default; it can also be downloaded for free from Apple).  This may be enough
of an annoyance to turn some users off.  I've had success with using GTK on
win32, and it's very standard on Linux systems.

I'm not sure what the status of QT on OS X is.

Tkinter still seems viable for things that don't require a lot of complex
controls. Also, it has a very powerful canvas widget.  However, it won't
look very good on unix systems (no anti-aliasing, for one thing).

If you don't need a lot of complex controls, you might consider the embedded
webserver + browser route using CherryPy or Twisted.web + Nevow.

wxPython seems to have the best cross-platform support among CPython
toolkits, but it never seemed very Pythonic to me.  There's a higher-level
package called wax that aims to remedy that.

Dave Cook