With EasyGUI, I Can Stick with Python

For all of recent history, I have used dialog for basic interaction with users. Dialog is a program callable from the shell that produces an assortment of not pretty but functional interaction boxes. Anyone who has installed Debian or any of its derivatives knows what they look like.

On the other end of the spectrum is QT, the GUI builder behind KDE. It is pretty, elegant, adaptable and, well, something that requires you to write (or generate) C++ code.

While Python tends to be my language of choice, it has always been a pain for tasks I have done with dialog and shell scripts. The reason is that the standard Python tools for doing GUIs do more than I generally want. Tkinter is a good example. It will do what I want but it requires writing an event-driven program and knowing more about Tk than I really want to know. Well, enter EasyGui. If you are familiar with using dialog, the best description of EasyGui is that it is dialog except it is activated by Python calls rather than shell commands. For the rest of you, this is from the EasyGui web page.

EasyGui provides an easy-to-use interface for simple GUI interaction with a user. It does not require the programmer to know anything about tkinter, frames, widgets, callbacks or lambda. All GUI interactions are invoked by simple function calls that return results.

I was going to write some of the typical stuff like how to write Hello World using EasyGui but this stuff is all pretty obvious. It is, well, easy. Where to use EasyGui, however, is worth mentioning.

In the past few years I have written web applications to perform a task because it is relatively easy to put together a form for user input and produce decent-looking user output. In many cases, however, I had no need for the web interface—the application was running locally. While the application was easy to write, the need for a web server and telling the user that they needed to use a browser to run the program was an unnecessary complication. EasyGui seems to be the perfect "right way" to write these types of applications.