7 Popular Python GUI Development Libraries

In this Python article, let's learn about GUI Development: 7 Popular Python GUI Development Libraries

Table of contents:

  • curses - Built-in wrapper for ncurses used to create terminal GUI applications.
  • Eel - A library for making simple Electron-like offline HTML/JS GUI apps.
  • enaml - Creating beautiful user-interfaces with Declarative Syntax like QML.
  • Flexx - Flexx is a pure Python toolkit for creating GUI's, that uses web technology for its rendering.
  • Gooey - Turn command line programs into a full GUI application with one line.
  • kivy - A library for creating NUI applications, running on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android and iOS.
  • pyglet - A cross-platform windowing and multimedia library for Python.

What is Python?

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. Its high-level built in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together. Python's simple, easy to learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Python supports modules and packages, which encourages program modularity and code reuse. The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are available in source or binary form without charge for all major platforms, and can be freely distributed.

What is GUI development?

A graphical user interface builder (or GUI builder), also known as GUI designer or sometimes RAD IDE, is a software development tool that simplifies the creation of GUIs by allowing the designer to arrange graphical control elements (often called widgets) using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor.

The Python GUI Project, or the PyGUI framework as it is more commonly known, is a simple API that enables developers to create user interfaces using native elements for Python applications.


7 Popular Python GUI Development Libraries

  1. curses

The curses module provides an interface to the curses library, the de-facto standard for portable advanced terminal handling.

While curses is most widely used in the Unix environment, versions are available for Windows, DOS, and possibly other systems as well. This extension module is designed to match the API of ncurses, an open-source curses library hosted on Linux and the BSD variants of Unix.

View on source


2.  Eel

A little Python library for making simple Electron-like HTML/JS GUI apps

Eel is a little Python library for making simple Electron-like offline HTML/JS GUI apps, with full access to Python capabilities and libraries.

Eel hosts a local webserver, then lets you annotate functions in Python so that they can be called from Javascript, and vice versa.

Eel is designed to take the hassle out of writing short and simple GUI applications. If you are familiar with Python and web development, probably just jump to this example which picks random file names out of the given folder (something that is impossible from a browser).

Intro

There are several options for making GUI apps in Python, but if you want to use HTML/JS (in order to use jQueryUI or Bootstrap, for example) then you generally have to write a lot of boilerplate code to communicate from the Client (Javascript) side to the Server (Python) side.

The closest Python equivalent to Electron (to my knowledge) is cefpython. It is a bit heavy weight for what I wanted.

Eel is not as fully-fledged as Electron or cefpython - it is probably not suitable for making full blown applications like Atom - but it is very suitable for making the GUI equivalent of little utility scripts that you use internally in your team.

For some reason many of the best-in-class number crunching and maths libraries are in Python (Tensorflow, Numpy, Scipy etc) but many of the best visualization libraries are in Javascript (D3, THREE.js etc). Hopefully Eel makes it easy to combine these into simple utility apps for assisting your development.

Join Eel's users and maintainers on Discord, if you like.

Install

Install from pypi with pip:

pip install eel

To include support for HTML templating, currently using Jinja2:

pip install eel[jinja2]

Usage

Directory Structure

An Eel application will be split into a frontend consisting of various web-technology files (.html, .js, .css) and a backend consisting of various Python scripts.

All the frontend files should be put in a single directory (they can be further divided into folders inside this if necessary).

my_python_script.py     <-- Python scripts
other_python_module.py
static_web_folder/      <-- Web folder
  main_page.html
  css/
    style.css
  img/
    logo.png

View on GitHub


3.  Enaml

Declarative User Interfaces for Python


Enaml is a programming language and framework for creating professional-quality user interfaces with minimal effort.

What you get

  • A declarative programming language, with a Pythonic flavour.
  • Dozens of widgets, ready to go out-of-the-box (built on Qt).
  • A constraints-based layout engine (built on Kiwi).
  • Integration with a data model tool (built on Atom).
  • An (optional) editor to allow you to see what the results will look like, as you type your code.
  • A well-documented and easy-to-follow code base, plus documentation with plenty of worked examples.
  • Language definitions for a number of popular editors.

What it can do for you

  • Build native GUI applications for a range of platforms
    • Quick and simple or complex and specialised.
    • See the structure of your GUI at a glance.
  • Let you rapidly prototype new GUIs interfaces.
    • Intelligently layout your GUI, using symbolic constraints.
    • It automatically adapts for different platforms, different window sizes.
    • Tell the layout engine what your priorities are for layout, without having to count pixels.
  • Encourages easy-to-maintain code:
    • The GUI can detect updates in the model, and refresh its widgets automatically, without low-level code.
    • Clean separation between your model and view, while keeping your controller code simple.
      • You can incorporate Python code directly in the view layer.
      • As your GUI design evolves, the constraints engine can adapt the layout.
      • Object-Oriented design allows you to reuse parts of your GUI in other parts of your projects.
  • Let you customise a GUI for your particular needs.
    • Integrates with your Python code.
    • Include style-sheets to change the appearance across all, or part, of your application quickly.
    • Extend the available widgets or build your own.

View on GitHub


4.  Flexx

Write desktop and web apps in pure Python


Want to stay up-to-date about (changes to) Flexx? Subscribe to the NEWS issue.

Introduction

Flexx is a pure Python toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUI's), that uses web technology for its rendering. Apps are written purely in Python; The PScript transpiler generates the necessary JavaScript on the fly.

You can use Flexx to create (cross platform) desktop applications, web applications, and export an app to a standalone HTML document. It also works in the Jupyter notebook.

Installation

Flexx requires Python 3.5+ and also works on pypy. Further, it depends on:

  • the Tornado library (pure Python).
  • the PScript library (a pure Python flexxui project).
  • the Webruntime library (a pure Python flexxui project).
  • the Dialite library (a pure Python flexxui project).

To install the latest release (and dependencies), use either of:

# Install latest release
pip install flexx

# Install latest from Github
pip install -U https://github.com/flexxui/flexx/archive/master.zip

Or get the bleeding edge with:

View on GitHub


5.  Gooey

Turn (almost) any Python 3 Console Program into a GUI application with one line

Quick Start

Installation instructions

The easiest way to install Gooey is via pip

pip install Gooey 

Alternatively, you can install Gooey by cloning the project to your local directory

git clone https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey.git

run setup.py

python setup.py install

Usage

Gooey is attached to your code via a simple decorator on whichever method has your argparse declarations (usually main).

from gooey import Gooey

@Gooey      <--- all it takes! :)
def main():
  parser = ArgumentParser(...)
  # rest of code

Different styling and functionality can be configured by passing arguments into the decorator.

# options
@Gooey(advanced=Boolean,          # toggle whether to show advanced config or not 
       language=language_string,  # Translations configurable via json
       auto_start=True,           # skip config screens all together
       target=executable_cmd,     # Explicitly set the subprocess executable arguments
       program_name='name',       # Defaults to script name
       program_description,       # Defaults to ArgParse Description
       default_size=(610, 530),   # starting size of the GUI
       required_cols=1,           # number of columns in the "Required" section
       optional_cols=2,           # number of columns in the "Optional" section
       dump_build_config=False,   # Dump the JSON Gooey uses to configure itself
       load_build_config=None,    # Loads a JSON Gooey-generated configuration
       monospace_display=False)   # Uses a mono-spaced font in the output screen
)
def main():
  parser = ArgumentParser(...)
  # rest of code

See: How does it Work section for details on each option.

View on GitHub


6.  Kivy

Innovative user interfaces made easy.

Kivy is an open source, cross-platform Python framework for the development of applications that make use of innovative, multi-touch user interfaces. The aim is to allow for quick and easy interaction design and rapid prototyping whilst making your code reusable and deployable.

Kivy is written in Python and Cython, based on OpenGL ES 2, supports various input devices and has an extensive widget library. With the same codebase, you can target Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. All Kivy widgets are built with multitouch support.

Kivy is MIT licensed, actively developed by a great community and is supported by many projects managed by the Kivy Organization.

Installation, Documentation and Examples

Extensive installation instructions as well as tutorials and general documentation, including an API reference, can be found at https://kivy.org/docs. A PDF version is also available.

Kivy ships with many examples which can be found in the examples folder.

View on GitHub


7.  pyglet

pyglet is a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library for Python, intended for developing games and other visually rich applications. It supports windowing, user interface event handling, Joysticks, OpenGL graphics, loading images and videos, and playing sounds and music. pyglet works on Windows, OS X and Linux.

NOTE! The pyglet-1.5-maintenance branch is the current stable release. The master branch contains the the development code for the upcoming 2.0 release, and may be unstable. If you want to do a pull request, please target the pyglet-1.5-maintenance branch where appropriate.

Pyglet has an active developer and user community. If you find a bug or a problem with the documentation, please open an issue. Anyone is welcome to join our discord server where a lot of the development discussion is going on. It's also a great place to ask for help.

Installation

pyglet is installable from PyPI:

pip install --upgrade --user pyglet

Installation from source

If you're reading this README from a source distribution, you can install pyglet with:

python setup.py install --user

You can also install the latest development version direct from Github using:

pip install --upgrade --user https://github.com/pyglet/pyglet/archive/master.zip

For local development install pyglet in editable mode:

# with pip
pip install -e .
# with setup.py
python setup.py develop

There are no compilation steps during the installation; if you prefer, you can simply add this directory to your PYTHONPATH and use pyglet without installing it. You can also copy pyglet directly into your project folder.

View on GitHub


GUI Development in Python FAQ

  • Is Python good for GUI development?

While being incredibly useful for the fields of data science and machine learning, Python is also great for developing graphical user interfaces! In fact, it has many frameworks that even beginners can use to easily get started with developing a GUI.

  • What is Python GUI programming?

Python offers multiple options for developing GUI (Graphical User Interface). Out of all the GUI methods, tkinter is the most commonly used method. It is a standard Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit shipped with Python. Python with tkinter is the fastest and easiest way to create the GUI applications.

  • How do you create a GUI in Python?

Import the Tkinter module. Create the GUI application main window. Add one or more of the above-mentioned widgets to the GUI application. Enter the main event loop to take action against each event triggered by the user.

  • Is Python GUI easy?

It's a fast and easy-to-use Python GUI library, making it the go-to library for building a Python GUI application.


Related videos:

Python GUI Development With PySimpleGUI


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