What are the advantages of PyQt over PyGTK and vice-versa? [closed]

Question

I have an application whose GUI is to be remade for ergonomic reasons. It was written in PyGTK and I am wondering if I should switch to PyQt to ease future developments or not.

This application has a mostly classical UI with buttons, toolbars, dialogs etc. but also has some specific requirements : I will certainly need to create a custom widget based on treeview/tableview (to make a spreadsheet-like widget) and this application has a lot of worker threads which update the GUI.

I am seeking advice on these two points :

• As regards the creation custom widgets, does PyQt provide better mechanisms than PyGTK, especially to slightly modify existing widgets.
• I had problems with (even when properly using threads_init() and threads_enter()) the updating of the GUI by worker threads while using PyGTK. Is PyQt any better on that point ?

Answer 1

I can't compare, because I don't use GTK, but I'd suggest Qt.

Qt definitely has "treeview/tableview" you're talking about and you can make the "cells" your custom widgets (I'm just studying this topic right now). Qt was made with a lot of thought about threads, so worker threads can use the signal/slot mechanism with ease. And yes, you can modify the existing widgets by applying stylesheets or subclassing.

Now about PyQt, I wouldn't recommend it because of licensing issues. PySide seems like a better Qt→Python binding to me: it can be used in commercial applications freely and has a few tiny advantages in the API (but otherwise it's fully compatible with PyQt).

Qt is cross-platform and deployment of PySide applications is very easy with cx_Freeze; users of your application won't have to install anything at all.

Answer 2

I also have no experience with GTK, but can offer some answers nevertheless:

• Qt is designed from the ground up to be object-oriented; almost everything in it has excellent support for subclassing. PyQt likewise.

• Qt explicitly does NOT support modification of the GUI by any threads other than the main GUI thread. You're likely to cause crashes this way. As BlaXpirit mentioned, though, there are a variety of very easy inter-thread communication mechanisms such as signal passing.