Is PyGObject a good replacement for Tk on both Windows and Linux?

0
votes

Python 3.5.4, Windows 7, Ubuntu Mate 18.04

We have 7-8 Python 3 based projects that are built to use both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Mate platforms. Most of the development is done on Windows using LiClipse and the user interface is tk. This has worked very well but we were trying to improve the interface look so we are attempting to use GTK+ 3. There have been numerous hours spent trying to get LiClipse to recognize the gi.repository(No module named 'gi'): LiClipse error

The GTK website mentions both vcpkg and MSYS2 installation methods. GTK Download for Windows

We installed and built GTK3 based on the vcpkg instructions only to realize that we would need to develop the code in Microsoft Visual Studio. I hesitate to go down the MSYS2 road as I'm not sure if this will allow Windows 7 development(with LiClipse) and deployment.

The second avenue looked at was something that was part of the pip ecosystem. Using pip to install packages for development and deployment has been extremely easy. The PyGObject seems to fit, but we are having issues installing pycario("Running setup.py install for pycairo: finished with status 'error'").

Because of the issues so far, we wanted to ask if we are proceeding down a road that will lead to a good solution. If we can get pip to install PyGObject, is it a good GTK+ 3 multiplatform replacement for tk ?

Thanks in advance.

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pythonwindowsgtk3ubuntu-18.04
If you are looking for a good cross platform GUI toolkit, have a look at Qt for Python. – Matteo Italia
We looked at using a normal Qt development environment a couple years back but ran into a lot of serial port issues(which is how we ended up coding the projects in Python.) Are you forced to used the Qt IDE if you want to use Qt for Python? – lynnejohn
Yep I remember a lot of trouble with the QtSerialPort part as well, but it's completely unrelated to the rest of the framework, especially the GUI part. As for the question, no, you can use whatever you want; it's "regular" Python. – Matteo Italia

1 Answers

1
votes

I have developed some projects for Windows and Linux using Gtk3 and I have to say it is really good. For my projects, coded in C++, I have used MSYS2. vcpkg works great too, but aims primarily at Visual Studio users. I would advice vcpkg for coding in C or C++.

I hesitate to go down the MSYS2 road as I'm not sure if this will allow Windows 7 development(with LiClipse) and deployment.

You should really try MSYS2. It has support for everything you need (even pip).