Environment without tkinter?

[petsuter]

Some Python platforms have no tkinter support. Is it possible to avoid this error?

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    import spectrochempy
  File "Python\lib\site-packages\spectrochempy\__init__.py", line 59, in <module>
    from spectrochempy import api
  File "Python\lib\site-packages\spectrochempy\api.py", line 89, in <module>
    from . import core
  File "Python\lib\site-packages\spectrochempy\core\__init__.py", line 366, in <module>
    from tkinter import filedialog
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tkinter'

(Qt would be available, but I'm not sure how to enable that and if it avoids tkinter completely. This didn't work:

from spectrochempy.application import SpectroChemPy
SpectroChemPy().preferences.use_qt = True
import spectrochempy

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    from spectrochempy.application import SpectroChemPy
  File "Python\lib\site-packages\spectrochempy\__init__.py", line 59, in <module>
    from spectrochempy import api
  File "Python\lib\site-packages\spectrochempy\api.py", line 89, in <module>
    from . import core
  File "Python\lib\site-packages\spectrochempy\core\__init__.py", line 366, in <module>
    from tkinter import filedialog
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tkinter'

)

[atravert]

Hi,
Thank you for your message. We used tkinter as defaullt because it is light and - in principle - belongs to the standard python library: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html . Could you give us more details on the platform you are using ?

Best,

[petsuter]

At least on Debian Linux tkinter is not available by default (but can be installed) and on MicroPython, the Windows embeddable package or the new WebAssembly platforms like Pyodide tkinter is not available at all I think.

[petsuter]

Thanks for investigating it.

I noticed there's a qt mode. Would it be possible to opt into that somehow as the default? On some platforms it's just not possible to install tkinter as far as I know.

As another example, the matplotlib library also uses tkinter by default, but on platforms without tkinter you can switch to the agg backend instead:

import matplotlib # This line does not require tkinter
matplotlib.use('agg',warn=False, force=True) # Switch from tkinter default backend to agg backend
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # This line would require tkinter, but now it doesn't.

https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/backends.html#the-builtin-backends

If you could somehow allow something like this:

import spectrochempy_config
spectrochempy_config.ui_toolkit('qt') # Or even None?
import spectrochempy

that would be nice.

Best.

[fernandezc]

Hi,
May be I do not understand well what you mean here, but it seems to me that can you do this using what we described here: https://www.spectrochempy.fr/latest/userguide/plotting/plotting.html#Selecting-the-output-window
that is: %matplotlib qt in Jupiter.
I am not sure however (as I did not check it yet) that tkinter is not needed even in this case.

[petsuter]

Hi, is it possible to do some equivalent without using Jupyter?

[fernandezc]

Let me look into this. I can probably add some configuration flags. For testing, since I can't remove tk from my platform (macOS) without breaking python, I have to install a virtual environment to get Debian first. This may take some time.

[petsuter]

FYI you can open a Pyodide shell simply by opening this link in your browser: https://pyodide.org/en/stable/console.html
and try to install spectrochempy:

>>> import micropip
>>> await micropip.install('spectrochempy')

And here seems to be MicroPython for macOS https://ports.macports.org/port/micropython/

But they have other limitations / differences too.

Maybe just temporarily removing / renaming the tkinter folder in Python's Lib is also an option.