Learning About Qt For Python

I have much professional experience with Qt from its native C++, but had never attempted Qt from Python.

The Qt Company's official adoption of the PySide project provides an attractive licensing alternative to the long-standing PyQt product.

These are my personal investigations of Qt for Python, learning by hand-crafting small, tested desktop applications.

Exercises

This is a brief summary of the exercises. Click the links above for more information. For example, link 1_hello_world has all details for the first exercise.

1. Hello World

   The typical first exercise, deliberately over-engineered to include a unit test -- useful for discovering configuration details.

2. Fixed Table

   A table view widget displays data from a small, fixed, table model.

Configuration

These exercises use Qt 6.3.0, the latest at the time of writing.

The corresponding PySide6 installation instructions worked well, mostly.

~ % mkdir QtForPython

~ % cd QtForPython

QtForPython % python3 -m venv env

QtForPython % source env/bin/activate

(env) QtForPython % pip3 install PySide6

(env) QtForPython % python3

>>> import PySide6

>>> PySide6.__version__
'6.3.0'

I had one error at the install step. It had helpful advice to upgrade pip in the Python virtual environment, as follows.

(env) QtForPython % pip3 install PySide6
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement PySide6 (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for PySide6
WARNING: You are using pip version 20.2.3; however, version 22.1.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the '/Users/ifisher/QtForPython/env/bin/python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip' command.

(env) QtForPython % python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

For now, I use QtCreator to configure, build, and run. That is fine for these personal learning exercises. A more production-like environment would require standalone build scripts and run scripts.

Ensure QtCreator is using the Python virtualenv with the PySide6 installation.

• In each fresh shell, activate the virtualenv, as shown above
• Launch QtCreator from the command line
• Open an application's .pyproject file
• Check the project build and run settings and set the interpreter to the virtual environment version