Which GUI toolkit is best for me?
 

- i want it to be easy to learn and not overly complicated to program. consistency is good too.
- i may be using almost all custom controls, plus menus.
- being easy to learn includes having adequate documentation for a beginner at gui toolkits to do at least what i want to do, preferably in python, so i don't have to figure out how to translate from c++
- speed is important. i've read that gtk is faster than qt..?
- i've read that qt has an advantage in that it uses signals and slots more than gtk, which uses more callbacks, which makes qt easier to debug. but since python has tracebacks, perhaps callbacks will be equally easy to debug..?
- i've heard something about wxwidgets being inconsistent. i'm also thinking it's slower because of the extra wrapper layer. and its main benefit, having native look and feel, is probably irrelevant to me since i'll be using primarily custom controls.
- i'll have to be running other processes, written in C, in the background and connecting with the GUI.

If speed is that important, you should be developing it in C, rather than Python. I suspect that the bottleneck is going to be your Python code, rather than an external GUI library written in C or C++.

Perhaps the most pertinent questions are: what OS are you using, and what license are you developing under? GTK is rather clunky under Windows and OSX, and Qt is only available for free under the GPL - so you either need to pay for a commercial license, or release your application as open source.

Personally, I prefer Qt, but if you want to develop applications for Windows without necessarily releasing the source code, and you don't want to stump up for the Qt license fee, then your best bet is wxWidgets.

using Windows. if I release my software I'll try to release it for windows, max and linux. when you say gtk is clunky, do you mean its widgets appear awkward? because i plan to use custom widgets anyway. (so one of my considerations is which is best for writing custom widgets.)

i've wondered about the python code being the bottleneck. but i've written some python scripts, and python seems to be pretty fast, at least for things that don't require a whole lot of processing. but i've yet to make an entire application in Python, so you could be right. although I'd write it in C#, I think that would be a lot less of a pain in the ***

Python's fast enough for most things, but then so are GUI toolkits. If you're going with purely custom widgets, you might even want to think about a raw graphics library like pygame.

And yep, GTK's widgets don't integrate with windows as well as the others, though a custom look would be okay.

You might also want to try out IronPython, which is Python for .NET. It's been in development a while, and at version 1.1, it's pretty stable. Get all the GUI advantages of C# with the syntax of Python :)

Actually, the GUI toolkit that comes with visual C# is pretty dismal. Not much fancy stuff there! The wxPython toolkit can easily run circles around that thing!

In my experience Py2Exe and wxPython work very well together for distributions.

I also recommend wxPython as well. I very rarely have to take up Python for GUI development, but it is still my favourite.:)

Re: Which GUI toolkit is best for me?
 

wxPython best.

Re: Which GUI toolkit is best for me?
 

Qt is great. It is a C++ toolkit, but there are very complete Python bindings (PyQt), and less complete Ruby bindings.