EasyGui FAQ

An FAQ consisting of far too few questions. Help please :)

General Questions

  1. What other gui libraries can I use?

    There are several. The two most popular as of 2014-12 are TkInter and PyQt.

    TkInter is a library shipped with Python and it is the de-facto standard for Python. You can find more about it at https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter

    PyQt is a very popular library. More information on it is at https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt

    A library inspired by easygui is the EasyGUI_qt project at http://easygui-qt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ “Under the hood” easygui uses Tkinter while EasyGUI_qt uses pyQt

  2. Why should I use easygui instead of some other library?

    Well, sometimes you should start with those other (excellent) libraries. However, we hope that you find easygui useful. Some of the cases for using easygui are:

    • You are starting to program and are tired of the command line >>>. easygui allows you to quickly create GUIs without worrying about all the details of Tk or Qt.
    • You already have a program and want to make it easier for people to use by building a GUI for it.
    • Its easy! You can try it out in a couple of hours and decide for yourself

    Don’t worry. With easygui you are learning the basics. We take only a few shortcuts to make things easier. If you decide to move to a library with more functionality, you will already understand some of the GUI basics.

Specifics

  1. Can I specify a custom sort order for the items in a choicebox?

    No, there is no way to specify a custom order. The reason is that the data must be sorted in order for the “jump to” feature (namely, to jump down in the list by pressing keyboard keys) to work.

    For some tips on how to control the order of items in a choicebox, see this recipe from the Easygui Cookbook.

  2. Button box images don’t appear and I get an error such as:

    Cannot load C:UsersRobertSkyDriveGitHubeasyguieasyguipython_and_check_logo.jpg. Check to make sure it is an image file. PIL library isn’t installed. If it isn’t installed, only .gif files can be used.

    Possibly you are trying to load files other than .gif. Unfortunately, the ‘PIL’ library must be installed for this to work.