PySimpleGUI Tutorial 5: Building an Executable Text Editor Application

In this PySimpleGUI tutorial, we will be creating a simple text editor executable app using PySimpleGUI library. Text editors are commonly used applications for reading, writing, and editing text files.

Step 1: Install PySimpleGUI
First, you need to install PySimpleGUI library if you haven’t done so already. You can install PySimpleGUI using pip by running the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

pip install PySimpleGUI

Step 2: Import necessary libraries
Next, you need to import the PySimpleGUI library and any other libraries that you will need for your text editor application. In this tutorial, we will be using the sg alias for PySimpleGUI library to make the code less verbose.

import PySimpleGUI as sg

Step 3: Create a layout for the text editor
Now, let’s create a layout for our text editor window. We will use a Text element to display the text and a Multiline input element for the user to type in. We will also add a Save button to save the text to a file.

layout = [
    [sg.Text('Enter text below:')],
    [sg.Multiline(size=(70, 20), key='-TEXT-')],
    [sg.Button('Save')]
]

Step 4: Create a PySimpleGUI window
Next, we need to create a PySimpleGUI window using the layout we created in the previous step. We will also set the title of the window to ‘Text Editor’.

window = sg.Window('Text Editor', layout)

Step 5: Main event loop
Now, we will create a main event loop to handle user input in the text editor window. The loop will run until the user closes the window by clicking the ‘X’ button or by clicking the ‘Exit’ button.

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

    if event == sg.WIN_CLOSED or event == 'Exit':
        break

window.close()

Step 6: Save button functionality
In the main event loop, we will check if the user clicks the ‘Save’ button and if they do, we will save the text in the Multiline input element to a file named ‘text.txt’.

if event == 'Save':
    text = values['-TEXT-']

    with open('text.txt', 'w') as f:
        f.write(text)
        sg.popup('Text saved to file.')

Step 7: Creating an executable app
To create an executable app from your text editor script, you can use PyInstaller. First, install PyInstaller using pip:

pip install pyinstaller

Then, run the following command in your terminal or command prompt to create an executable app:

pyinstaller --onefile your_script.py

Replace your_script.py with the name of your text editor script.

And that’s it! You have created a simple text editor executable app using PySimpleGUI library. You can now run the executable app on any machine without needing to install Python or any additional libraries. Feel free to customize the text editor further by adding more functionality like open, save as, or edit features.