An article about wxPython, one of the most popular desktop graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits for the Python programming language
Have you ever wanted to restart your Windows PC with out pressing Start, Shutdown or CTRL+ALT+DEL? What about restarting your annoying co-worker’s PC…the one who just doesn’t know when to shut up? Well, Python has the answer and this blog will tell you how to do it!
Restarting PCs with Python Read More »
The other day, I was chatting with some wxPython newbies on the wxPython IRC channel and one of them wanted to know how to display images in wx. There are lots of different ways to do this, but I had a pre-made solution that I’d cobbled together a couple of years ago for work. Since
Creating a Simple Photo Viewer with wxPython Read More »
Yesterday, I received a request to create a GUI with Tkinter or wxPython that had an image for the background with buttons on top. After looking at Tkinter, I discovered that it’s PhotoImage widget only supported two formats: gif and pgm (unless I installed the Python Imaging Library). Because of this, I decided to give
wxPython: Putting a Background Image on a Panel Read More »
The grid widget in wxPython is one of the most complex GUI elements that you’ll work with in this toolkit. In this article you will learn the basics of grid creation and usage. One of the major uses for a grid is to display tabular data. Another use is to create some kind of spreadsheet.
wxPython: An Introduction to Grids Read More »
A few days ago, I wrote an article about using ConfigObj with wxPython. The first question I was asked about the article regarded using a configuration file to generate the dialog. I thought this was an interesting idea, so I took a stab at implementing that functionality. Personally I think it would be probably be
Generating a Dialog from a File Read More »
I recently starting using Michael Foord’s ConfigObj for one of our internal wxPython applications at work. When I wrote my other ConfigObj tutorial, I wanted to show you how I was using ConfigObj with my preferences dialog, but I didn’t want all my posts to include wx. In this article, I’ll just show you how
ConfigObj + wxPython = Geek Happiness Read More »
During the summer, I stumbled upon an article on Ars Technica about using PyGTK to create a URL shortener. I thought that was pretty interesting, but I don’t use PyGTK. So at that point, I decided to write my own using wxPython and use the article’s code to do the shortening. I hacked together something
Shortening URLS with wxPython Read More »
The wxPython ListCtrl is a very handy widget. Unfortunately, it can be a pain to use as well. This discovery caused Phillip Piper, missionary to Mozambique, to write ObjectListView, a wrapper for the wx.ListCtrl. ObjectListView actually adds functionality because it uses objects to create its rows and thus, it makes gettings information from multiple columns
wxPython: Using ObjectListView instead of a ListCtrl Read More »
In the first part of this series, I wrote on all the non-agw notebook widgets included with wxPython. For this second article, I will be focusing on the two notebooks that are in the AGW library of wxPython. AGW stands for Advanced Generic Widgets, a set of widgets that are written in Python instead of
The “Book” Controls of wxPython (Part 2 of 2) Read More »
If you’re new to GUI programming (and wxPython in particular), you may not know what a “book” control is. It may be that other languages call this control something different too. In wxPython, a book control allows the user to switch between various panels. The most common examples are browsers and system option dialogs with
The “Book” Controls of wxPython (Part 1 of 2) Read More »
There is a lot of bad code in the world. My objective in this article is to help wxPython programmers learn how to make their applications easier to maintain and modify. It should be noted that what is in this article is not necessarily the so-called “best” way to refactor a program; instead the following
wxPython: Refactoring Your Program Read More »
The last couple weeks, I’ve seen multiple people ask about resetting the color of a widget back to its original “default” color. There was at least one guy on the wxPython mailing list and another on their IRC channel that requested info on this topic. When I first looked up this issue, it was for
wxPython: Resetting the Background Color Read More »
In this post, I’ll detail how to catch specific key presses and why this can be useful. This is another in my series of “requested” tutorials. There really isn’t much to catching key presses, but it can be a little confusing when one widget behaves slightly differently from another. The really complicated stuff comes in
wxPython: Catching Key and Char Events Read More »
I had a request this week to write up a quick tutorial on focus events in wxPython. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of material to cover on this subject, so this should be a pretty quick and dirty little post. I’ll see you after the jump!
wxPython: Learning to Focus Read More »
This past couple of weeks, I’ve seen multiple people ask about timers and how they work either on the wxPython mailing list or on their IRC channel. So I decided it was high time I wrote a couple of example scripts to show how they’re used. I will cover two examples, the first of which
wxPython: Using wx.Timers Read More »