How to Build an Advanced GUI App Using PySimpleGUI: A Comprehensive Tutorial

In this tutorial, we will create an advanced GUI app using PySimpleGUI, which is a simple yet powerful Python library for creating graphical user interfaces. We will walk through the process of creating a fully functional app with multiple GUI elements such as buttons, input fields, dropdown menus, checkboxes, and more.

Step 1: Install PySimpleGUI

First, you need to install PySimpleGUI on your system. You can do this using pip by running the following command in your terminal:

pip install PySimpleGUI

Step 2: Import the necessary modules

Next, we need to import the PySimpleGUI module in our Python script. We will also import any other modules that we need for our app, such as sys for handling command-line arguments.

import PySimpleGUI as sg
import sys

Step 3: Define the layout of the GUI

Now, we will define the layout of our GUI app using PySimpleGUI elements. The layout is a list of lists, where each inner list represents a row of elements in the GUI. Here is an example layout that includes a text input field, a submit button, and a label to display the result:

layout = [
    [sg.Text('Enter your name:'), sg.InputText()],
    [sg.Button('Submit')],
    [sg.Text(size=(40, 1), key='output')]
]

Step 4: Create the window

Next, we will create a PySimpleGUI window object with our defined layout and set some window properties, such as the window title and size.

window = sg.Window('My GUI App', layout, size=(400, 150))

Step 5: Event loop

Now, we will enter the event loop, where we will handle user input and update the GUI elements accordingly. We will continuously read events from the window until the user closes the window.

while True:
    event, values = window.read()

    if event == sg.WIN_CLOSED:
        break

    if event == 'Submit':
        name = values[0]
        window['output'].update(f'Hello, {name}!')

Step 6: Close the window

Finally, we need to close the window and cleanup any resources used by the app.

window.close()

And that’s it! You have now created an advanced GUI app using PySimpleGUI. Feel free to customize the layout and add more GUI elements to your app to make it more interactive and user-friendly. Happy coding!