GUI Toolkits

The wxPython toolkit added context managers to its code base a few years ago, but for some reason you don’t see very many examples of their use. In this article, we’ll look at three examples of context managers in wxPython. A wxPython user was the first person to suggest using context managers in wxPython on

The other day, I came across an interesting StackOverflow question where the fellow was trying to figure out how to open a sub-frame only once. Basically he wanted a single instance of the sub-frame (and other sub-frames). After digging around a bit on Google, I found an old thread from the wxPython Google Group that

I recently came across a StackOverflow question where the fellow was asking how to get wxPython’s RichTextCtrl’s XML data so he could save it to a database. I don’t know much about this control, but after a quick Google search, I found an article from 2008 that gave me the information I needed. I took

The wxPython library comes with a pair of handy methods called Freeze() and Thaw(). The call to Freeze() prevents the window from updating while it is frozen. This can be useful when you are adding or removing widgets and you want to reduce your UI from appearing to flicker. After you finish updating the UI,

The wxPython GUI toolkit includes its own date / time capabilities. Most of the time, you can just use Python’s datetime and time modules and you’ll be fine. But occasionally you’ll find yourself needing to convert from wxPython’s wx.DateTime objects to Python’s datetime objects. You may encounter this when you use the wx.DatePickerCtrl widget. Fortunately,

I’ve been using wxPython for quite a while now and I see certain questions come up on a fairly frequent basis. One of the popular ones is how to ask the user for their credentials before loading up the rest of the application. There are several approaches to this, but I am going to focus

One of my friends on the wxPython Google Group asked how to catch any exception that happens in wxPython. The problem is complicated somewhat because wxPython is a wrapper on top of a C++ library (wxWidgets). You can read about the issue on the wxPython wiki. Several wxPython users mentioned using Python’s sys.excepthook to catch

The wxPython toolkit provides an alternative to using Sizers for layout that is known as “sized_controls”. These controls or widgets are basically top-level widgets (like frame, panel, dialog, etc) that have sizing logic built into them. This article will cover all four types of sized_controls. They are as follows: SizedPanel SizedScrolledPanel SizedFrame SizedDialog The SizedScrolledPanel

wxPython 2.9 introduced the world to a new type of sizer that can take widgets and automatically make them “wrap” around as you resize the frame. That sizer is known as wx.WrapSizer. For some reason, it is relatively unknown, so we’ll spend a few minutes going over how to use it in this article. To