tkui - a visual introspective GUI maker with live editing of the GUI and its editor at the same time

Installation and running

pip install -r requirements.txt

which installs the dependencies uielem and undoable. Run

python guided_tour.py

to start the guided tour which gives an idea of how the pieces work.

To start the default editor instead:

python tkui.py

Note that both need to be started from the tkui directory.

Rationale and intended use

Its easier to make a GUI if you can visually see the result immediately and there are a few editors that allows this. But why should the GUI editor itself be off limits? What if you suddenly want to add many new objects of a certain type to your GUI? This is something that would need adding a feature to the editor. tkui lets you do this with no need to recompile, no need to even restart the program.

The guided tour explains this by showing it: The intended way to use tkui is to start python tkui.py, create a root tk.Frame or tk.Toplevel somewhere (anywhere) where the new UI you're making will be. Then add to that root element through, save everything under the root using the gencode function and then use the generated code for UI layout in your program.

For things with callbacks, edit functions.py (tour_functions.py in the guided tour) and reload it (using the "Reload" button or execfile("functions")). This way you can see right away if the new function works or not.

Some widgets are available for wrapping Python values directly (BoxedList, BoxedBool, BoxedDict).

History

tkui is the result of a bad joke gone too far. Just wanted to see how self-referential I could make it. After that, a guided tour instead of documentation seemed self-referentially appropriate.

Todo

• Finish explaining what everything does in the guided tour.
• Think of other visual representations of list and dict, especially `dict.
• Repackage a lot of the global state (into classes or other).
• Determine what works and doesn't work with undo/redo and make more things work.