Using guikit

The purpose of guikit is to save you time to start creating your GUI. Therefore, no matter how you use it: if it saves you time, it is well used. There are, however, some general approaches that you could follow:

The indended way

The intention when creating guikit is to remove from sight everything that is not the code you need to implement the business logic and the views specific for your application. For that reason, the simplest way of using guikit is as a dependency for your project from where you import all the relevant components that you need.

To get you started, just create a virtual environment to host your project, install guikit in there with pip install guikit (see the installation instructions for extra information on this) and then run:

python -m guikit init my_app -t .

This command will create in the target directory a package called my_app with several modules inside and a subpackage called extensions in where to put your plugins (see the secction about creating plugins).

- my_app
 |- __init__.py
 |- __main__.py
 |- config.py
 |- extensions
    |- __init__.py

These files in reality contain very little code: they just import guikit to create the main window, the logger and give some default values to the few configuration options. All you need to do now is to populate the extensions subpackage with the plugins you need.

If you add the following setup.cfg, setup.py and pyproject.toml files at the same level that my_app (you can read more about these two files in the setuptools documentation):

# pyproject.toml
[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools", "wheel"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

# setup.cfg
[metadata]
name = my_app
version = attr: my_app.VERSION

[options]
packages = find:
include_package_data = True
install_requires =
    guikit
    wxPython

# setup.py
# Only needed to install the tool in 'edit' mode
from setuptools import setup

setup()

Then you can install your new package in edit mode and see the magic happens:

pip install -e .
python -m my_app

The last line will launch your new application, opening its main window - altough with nothing inside. If you are using conda on MacOS, the last command should be:

pythonw -m my_app

The advanced way

The above option is the simplest and fastest one, but you will need to acept the design choices we have made in terms of layout of components and how to structure the code and extensions.

If you want to have the freedom of changing any of this and adapt it to your needs, just download the lastest version of the code from GitHub and use guikit source code itself as a template to create your own application. You will want to remove some information from there, like the documentation, the skeleton or some of the script options for initialising a repo, as above. And you will need to adapt the metadata from setup.cfg, and the secrets used in GitHub Actions. But otherwise it should be a fully functional tool that, again, will save you time.