Building a GUI Toolkit
in [Python]
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From: Tim Diels on 18 Apr 2010 07:49 Hi I was thinking of writing a GUI toolkit from scratch using a basic '2D library'. I have already come across the Widget Construction Kit. My main question is: Could I build a GUI toolkit of reasonable performance with the Widget Construction Kit, would it still feel more or less lightweight? By reasonable I mean that the user wouldn't think of the interface as being slow or unresponsive. I've also thought of using pyglet to build widgets with, but this would seem to be overkill. As a side question: by using opengl, the work would be delegated to the GPU rather than the CPU; is this always a good thing, or does it have downsides as well (performance, power usage, ...)? Are there any other libraries that may be of interest to me? Thanks in advance
From: Martin P. Hellwig on 18 Apr 2010 13:06 On 04/18/10 12:49, Tim Diels wrote: > Hi > > I was thinking of writing a GUI toolkit from scratch using a basic '2D > library'. I have already come across the Widget Construction Kit. > > My main question is: Could I build a GUI toolkit of reasonable > performance with the Widget Construction Kit, would it still feel more > or less lightweight? By reasonable I mean that the user wouldn't think > of the interface as being slow or unresponsive. > > I've also thought of using pyglet to build widgets with, but this would > seem to be overkill. As a side question: by using opengl, the work would > be delegated to the GPU rather than the CPU; is this always a good > thing, or does it have downsides as well (performance, power usage, ...)? > > Are there any other libraries that may be of interest to me? > > Thanks in advance It probably depends on how low level you want to go, I have pondered about the possibility myself to have an all python(ic) gui toolkit, capable of writing a (x11) windowing manager itself with. But I decided that using tkinter and just live with its rough corners is more bang for the buck for me than to reimplement tkinter badly. However as a thought exercise I did spend some energy on it and I had the following ideas. - Need to have direct access to at least x11, cocoa and win32gui; or even lower than that (if possible/reasonable). - Only need to abstract enough so I can display a borderless window full screen or on any position/size. - Need to provide a wrapper for the input devices too, e.g.: keyboard, mouse, joystick, touchscreen, etc. - Optionally graphical acceleration (OpenGL, DirectX, SDL?) - It would be good that fonts, windows, decoration and icons are all SVG so that all these items can scale independently. I also had some more questions: - How about providing an interface for video playback? - How about audio? - How about printing? - How about multiple displays? - How about odd sized displays (round, triangle, etc)? - How to handle 'legacy' gui applications? - Need to remain completely BSD licensed so that it is possible that it might some day be incorporated in the standard distribution. So I gave up on it as it seem to me much to much work for not enough ROI, but I still would welcome anyone giving it a shot :-) -- mph
From: Lie Ryan on 20 Apr 2010 14:53 On 04/19/10 03:06, Martin P. Hellwig wrote: > On 04/18/10 12:49, Tim Diels wrote: >> Hi >> >> I was thinking of writing a GUI toolkit from scratch using a basic '2D >> library'. I have already come across the Widget Construction Kit. >> >> My main question is: Could I build a GUI toolkit of reasonable >> performance with the Widget Construction Kit, would it still feel more >> or less lightweight? By reasonable I mean that the user wouldn't think >> of the interface as being slow or unresponsive. >> >> I've also thought of using pyglet to build widgets with, but this would >> seem to be overkill. As a side question: by using opengl, the work would >> be delegated to the GPU rather than the CPU; is this always a good >> thing, or does it have downsides as well (performance, power usage, ...)? >> >> Are there any other libraries that may be of interest to me? >> >> Thanks in advance > > It probably depends on how low level you want to go, I have pondered > about the possibility myself to have an all python(ic) gui toolkit, > capable of writing a (x11) windowing manager itself with. > But I decided that using tkinter and just live with its rough corners is > more bang for the buck for me than to reimplement tkinter badly. > Rather than writing a windowing toolkit from the low-level, I would rather like to see some wrapper for existing windowing toolkit which uses more pythonic idioms. Most popular python GUI toolkit currently in use are only a simple thin wrapper over the library they're wrapping and exposes a lot of the design considerations of the language that the toolkit was originally written in. Yes, even Tkinter that comes with the standard lib is a hack on top of python and looks much more Tcl-ish than pythonic. I have always had the idea of writing a windowing toolkit wrapper that creatively uses python features for maximum expressiveness (e.g. decorator, with-statement, for-each), but never got the time to write anything like that.
From: Martin P. Hellwig on 20 Apr 2010 16:15 On 04/20/10 19:53, Lie Ryan wrote: <cut> > > Rather than writing a windowing toolkit from the low-level, I would > rather like to see some wrapper for existing windowing toolkit which > uses more pythonic idioms. > > Most popular python GUI toolkit currently in use are only a simple thin > wrapper over the library they're wrapping and exposes a lot of the > design considerations of the language that the toolkit was originally > written in. Yes, even Tkinter that comes with the standard lib is a hack > on top of python and looks much more Tcl-ish than pythonic. > > I have always had the idea of writing a windowing toolkit wrapper that > creatively uses python features for maximum expressiveness (e.g. > decorator, with-statement, for-each), but never got the time to write > anything like that. Well I suppose you could piggyback on tk for that and rewrapping tkinter to be more pythonic is probably more doable than rewriting it from scratch. -- mph
From: Martin P. Hellwig on 20 Apr 2010 19:57
On 04/20/10 21:15, Martin P. Hellwig wrote: > On 04/20/10 19:53, Lie Ryan wrote: > <cut> >> >> Rather than writing a windowing toolkit from the low-level, I would >> rather like to see some wrapper for existing windowing toolkit which >> uses more pythonic idioms. >> >> Most popular python GUI toolkit currently in use are only a simple thin >> wrapper over the library they're wrapping and exposes a lot of the >> design considerations of the language that the toolkit was originally >> written in. Yes, even Tkinter that comes with the standard lib is a hack >> on top of python and looks much more Tcl-ish than pythonic. >> >> I have always had the idea of writing a windowing toolkit wrapper that >> creatively uses python features for maximum expressiveness (e.g. >> decorator, with-statement, for-each), but never got the time to write >> anything like that. > > Well I suppose you could piggyback on tk for that and rewrapping tkinter > to be more pythonic is probably more doable than rewriting it from scratch. > On second thought, if you would like borderless windows (for example to implement all widgets from scratch), you run into troubles, as overrideredirect also affects the keyboard focus, so you can't use the keyboard in any widget created. And also it would be ice to still have an iconify option. -- mph |