Simple Python UI in 30 mins

Python is my favorite language. You can automate just about any task a computer is capable of with it. I struggled for a while in finding a UI solution for my simple python programs that was straightforward and not overly complex. I am not writing enterprise, or even compiled programs… Simply just little programs for encrypting files, bots, or scraping the web. There quite a few to choose from, but in my opinion they tend to be more complex than needed for my uses. The easiest and fastest solution I’ve found thus far is PAGE. After installing and poking around, you’ll have a simple ui inside of 30 minutes. I’ve used this on both windows and mac, not sure if you can use it on linux.

Installation:
Download & Install PAGE editor from: http://page.sourceforge.net/
Download & Install Active TCL from: https://www.activestate.com/Products/activetcl/

Open the page folder once you’ve installed and double click on ‘page.tcl’.

The editor will open, and you’ll get a few scattered sub-menus. This throws you off at first, but all you need to do is click on Toplevel inside of the Widget Toolbar.

This creates the base level of your new ui, from there you van try adding different widgets and labels. In the image I add labels, text fields and buttons. Resizing the Toplevel dictates the size of your ui window. The Attribute Editor populates with attributes according to which widget you have selected in the Widget Tree.

Change the element name, color add a command that links to the element.

When satisfied with your ui, in the top bar go to Gen_Python > Generate Python UI & Generate Python Support Module.

This generates a python file for the ui and one for the functionality of your program. The ui uses tkinter, I’ve used ui generated by PAGE on Windows, Mac and Linux without issue. This ui is definitely limited, it doesn’t look beautiful, and wont scale nicely.

For speed and simplicity this workflow cant be be beat imo. So download and play around, hopefully you’ll find it useful.