guikit 0.3.0

Small tool to simplify the creation of GUIs

GUIKIT

This little tool's purpose is to facilitate getting started building a GUI for your software. It takes care of most of the boilerplate code that you need to build a GUI - making some opinionated decisions about the general layout of the application - so you can focus on adding the business logic and views specific to your problem.

guikit uses wXPython as the GUI framework, meaning that the resulting application will have a native look and feel regadless of running it on Windows, Linux or MacOS.

What guikit is and what is not

guikit takes care of the boilerplate code and enables you to have a minimal application running in no time, but you still need to code the rest of your GUI mannually yourself. That means you will need to learn how to use wxPython, the widgets it offers and their options.

This is not a graphical designer for GUIs, as it could be QT Designer, Glade or Matlab's App Designer. All of those are excellent tools... just a different kind of tools. guikit will save you some valuable time when creating a GUI, but it is still a low level library.

Why wxPython as GUI framework

While there are several excellent frameworks available, mature, well supported and with many options for customization - in particular PySide2 and PyQt, both based in QT - wxPython offers a licensing scheme a little bit more flexible that makes it suitable for both open and close source projects.

We strongly support open source software and open research, but we understand that it is not always possible or advisable, at least at beginning, and we want to offer a tool that could suit most users most of the time.

Installation instructions

WARNING: guikit is in an early stage of development and the API might change without notice. Use it in production with caution. And please, contribute to it to help improving its maturity as fast as posisble!

guikit and its dependencies can be installed with pip in Windows, Linux and MacOS (see notes below):

pip install guikit

What about linux

guikit can be installed in Linux with pip, but wxPython will likely need to be built from source as there are not manylinux wheels for it, yet.

The best option is for you to check if there is a wheel available for your specific linux distirbution and python version in the wxPython downloads webpage and install that one before installing guikit. Otherwise, in the same webpage you have instructions on how to install wxPython from source.

Alternatively, if you use conda, you can install wxPython from conda-forge and then install guikit as above.

What about MacOS

wxPython causes some issue on MacOS when installed with a "Non Framework" version of python. It typically complains with this error message:

This program needs access to the screen. Please run with a
Framework build of python, and only when you are logged in
on the main display of your Mac.

To work around this:

1. Install a python.org version of python.
2. Find executable under /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/....
3. Use that executable to create a virtual environment: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/<version>/bin/python3 -m venv .venv.
4. Install guikit inside virtual environment, and all should work!

Alternatively, if you use conda to install wxPython, you will need to use pythonw to execute your applications. See wxPython downloads webpage for more information on this.

Using guikit

There are several ways you can benefit from guikit, depending on what you want to achieve. Check the documentation for full details.

• Initialise your current directory with a skeleton for your GUI application using guikit with python -m guikit init my_app.
• Run guikit with all its available expensions for your to have a look and explore the things you can do with it, uwing python -m guikit run.
• Explore guikit's repo, flick trhough the code, learn how to do things, brings those which are useful to your own application, or clone the whole repo and customize the core classes and functions to fully suit your needs.