To create a GUI for your windows and dialogs in PyQt, you can take two main paths: you can use Qt Designer, or you can hand code the GUI in plain Python code. The first path can dramatically improve your productivity, whereas the second path puts you in full control of your application’s code.
GUI applications often consist of a main window and several dialogs. If you’re looking to create these graphical components in an efficient and user-friendly way, then Qt Designer is the tool for you. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Qt Designer to create your GUIs productively.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn:
- What Qt Designer is and how to install it on your system
- When to use Qt Designer vs hand coding for building your GUIs
- How to build and lay out the GUI of an application’s main window using Qt Designer
- How to create and lay out the GUI of your dialogs with Qt Designer
- How to use Qt Designer’s
.uifiles in your GUI applications
For a better understanding of the topics in this tutorial, you can check out the following resources:
- Python and PyQt: Building a GUI Desktop Calculator
- Python and PyQt: Creating Menus, Toolbars, and Status Bars
- PyQt Layouts: Create Professional-Looking GUI Applications
You’ll put all this knowledge together by using the GUIs that you’ll build with Qt Designer in a sample text editor application. You can get the code and all the required resources to build this application by clicking the link below:
Get the Source Code: Click here to get the source code you’ll use to learn about creating Python GUI applications with Qt Designer in this tutorial.
Getting Started With Qt Designer
Qt Designer is a Qt tool that provides you with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) user interface to create GUIs for your PyQt applications productively and efficiently. With this tool, you create GUIs by dragging and dropping QWidget objects on an empty form. After that, you can arrange them into a coherent GUI using different layout managers.
Qt Designer also allows you to preview your GUIs using different styles and resolutions, connect signals and slots, create menus and toolbars, and more.
Qt Designer is platform and programming language independent. It doesn’t produce code in any particular programming language, but it creates .ui files. These files are XML files with detailed descriptions of how to generate Qt-based GUIs.
You can translate the content of .ui files into Python code with pyuic5, which is a command-line tool that comes with PyQt. Then you can use this Python code in your GUI applications. You can also read .ui files directly and load their content to generate the associated GUI.
Installing and Running Qt Designer
There are several ways to get and install Qt Designer depending on your current platform. If you use Windows or Linux, then you can run the following commands from your terminal or command line:
$ python3 -m venv ./venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip install pyqt5 pyqt5-tools
Here, you create a Python virtual environment, activate it, and install pyqt5 and pyqt5-tools. pyqt5 installs PyQt and a copy of the required Qt libraries, while pyqt5-tools installs a set of Qt tools that includes Qt Designer.
The installation will place the Qt Designer executable in a different directory according to your platform:
- Linux:
...lib/python3.x/site-packages/qt5_applications/Qt/bin/designer - Windows:
...Lib\site-packages\pyqt5_tools\designer.exe
On Linux systems, such as Debian and Ubuntu, you can also install Qt Designer by using the system package manager with the following command:
$ sudo apt install qttools5-dev-tools
This command downloads and installs Qt Designer and other Qt tools on your system. In other words, you’ll have a system-wide installation and you’ll be able to run Qt Designer by clicking its icon in a file manager or system menu.
On macOS, if you’ve installed Qt from Homebrew using the brew install qt command, then you should have Qt Designer already installed on your system.
Finally, you can download the Qt installer for your current platform from the official download site and then follow the on-screen instructions. In this case, to complete the installation process, you need to register a Qt account.
If you’ve already installed Qt Designer using one of the options discussed so far, then go ahead and launch the application. You should get the following two windows on your screen:
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/qt-designer-python/ »
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