Creating Windows Apps in Minutes with PySimpleGUI: A User-Friendly Guide to GUI Programming

PySimpleGUI is a Python library that allows you to easily create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for your Python applications. With PySimpleGUI, you can create windows apps in minutes without a lot of code.

In this tutorial, I will walk you through the basics of PySimpleGUI and show you how to create your first GUI application using PySimpleGUI.

Step 1: Install PySimpleGUI

First, you need to install PySimpleGUI on your system. You can do this using pip, the Python package installer. Open a terminal or command prompt and run the following command:

pip install PySimpleGUI

This will download and install the PySimpleGUI library on your system.

Step 2: Import PySimpleGUI

Once PySimpleGUI is installed, you can start using it in your Python scripts. To do this, you need to import the PySimpleGUI library at the beginning of your script. Add the following line to the top of your Python script:

import PySimpleGUI as sg

Step 3: Create a GUI window

To create a GUI window using PySimpleGUI, you first need to create a layout for the window. A layout is a list of elements that define the structure and content of the window. Here’s a simple example of a layout that contains a text element and a button element:

layout = [[sg.Text('Hello, PySimpleGUI!')], [sg.Button('Click me')]]

The sg.Text element creates a text element with the text ‘Hello, PySimpleGUI!’, and the sg.Button element creates a button element with the label ‘Click me’. These elements are arranged in a list of lists, where each inner list represents a row in the window.

Step 4: Create the window

Once you have defined the layout for the window, you can create the window itself using the sg.Window class. Here’s how you can create a window with the layout defined above:

window = sg.Window('My First PySimpleGUI App', layout)

The sg.Window class takes two arguments: the title of the window (‘My First PySimpleGUI App’ in this case) and the layout for the window (the layout variable defined above).

Step 5: Read events from the window

After creating the window, you can start interacting with it by reading events from it. To do this, you can use a loop that iterates over the events generated by the window. Here’s an example loop that reads events from the window:

while True:
    event, values = window.read()
    if event == sg.WINDOW_CLOSED or event == 'Exit':
        break
    if event == 'Click me':
        sg.popup('You clicked the button!')

In this loop, the window.read() method reads the next event from the window and returns a tuple containing the event and the values of any input elements in the window. The loop terminates when the window is closed or the ‘Exit’ event is triggered.

Step 6: Run the application

Finally, you can run the PySimpleGUI application by executing the loop that reads events from the window. Here’s the complete script that creates a simple GUI window with a text element and a button element:

import PySimpleGUI as sg

layout = [[sg.Text('Hello, PySimpleGUI!')], [sg.Button('Click me')]]

window = sg.Window('My First PySimpleGUI App', layout)

while True:
    event, values = window.read()
    if event == sg.WINDOW_CLOSED or event == 'Exit':
        break
    if event == 'Click me':
        sg.popup('You clicked the button!')

window.close()

Save this script to a file called app.py and run it from the command line. You should see a GUI window with a text element and a button element. Clicking the button will trigger a popup that says ‘You clicked the button!’.

That’s it! You’ve just created your first GUI application using PySimpleGUI. With PySimpleGUI, you can quickly and easily create Windows apps in minutes without a lot of code. I encourage you to explore the PySimpleGUI documentation and experiment with different elements and layouts to create more complex GUI applications. Happy coding!