Python Desktop Handbook

Changelog

Version 1.0 — in progress

The book is being rewritten. The previous edition taught PyGTK and GTK 2, a stack that has had no release since 2011; this one teaches GTK 4 with PyGObject in Part I and Qt 6 with PySide6 in Part II.

Three things changed about how the book is made, as well as what is in it:

  • The source moved from LyX to Markdown. The site is built with Jekyll and the PDF with pandoc, from the same files.
  • Every listing is a file under examples/, and every example is started and shut down again on each build. Code that stops working fails the build.
  • Figures that can be generated are generated, by running the example that draws them, rather than being screenshots that slowly stop matching the text.

Part I — GTK 4 with PyGObject — is complete:

  • Getting Started with GTK 4 — Gtk.Application, boxes without packing arguments, grouped check buttons in place of radio buttons, Gtk.DropDown, menus as models plus actions, asynchronous dialogs, and libadwaita.
  • GObject — new. Properties, signals and bindings: the layer the rest of Part I is built on and the previous edition never explained.
  • More GTK 4 — list and column views over Gio.ListStore, Gtk.FileDialog, drag and drop through controllers, Gtk.Picture, Gtk.Template, notifications.
  • Threads and Asynchronous Work — new. Gio’s async APIs, worker threads, cancellation and asyncio. gdk_threads_enter() is gone and has no replacement.
  • Drawing with Cairo — Cairo through Gtk.DrawingArea, Pango for text, GtkSnapshot for widget drawing.
  • Custom Widgets — new, and finally written: the previous edition’s chapter of this name contained one line. Composition, measure and allocate, and layout managers.
  • Printing — Gtk.PrintOperation, pagination, and exporting a PDF so printing is testable without a printer.
  • Desktop Integration — GSettings in place of GConf, desktop files, libsecret in place of the gnome-keyring API, portals.
  • Audio and Video with GStreamer — GStreamer 1.0, Gtk.MediaFile, pipelines and the bus, discovery, transcoding.
  • D-Bus — GDBus in place of dbus-python, proxies, signals, and exporting a service.
  • Animation and Transitions — replaces Clutter with container transitions, CSS, Adw.Animation and the frame clock.
  • Embedding Web Content — WebKitGTK 6.0 in place of gtkmozembed, and the JavaScript bridge.
  • Internationalization — gettext without intltool, and the two text-domain bindings GTK needs.
  • Packaging and Distribution — replaces IronPython and Gtk#. Meson, GResource, AppStream metadata and Flatpak.
  • Migrating from PyGTK — a translation table from the previous edition’s idioms.

The appendices were rewritten too: Icon Names is now a stock-item to icon-name mapping rather than the GTK 2 stock list, and the bibliography is now Further Reading, pointing at documentation that still exists.

Part II — Qt 6 with PySide6 — is not written yet.

Dropped, because the technology was retired rather than replaced: the IronPython and Gtk# chapter, the PyGTK-on-Windows appendix, and the unfinished Telepathy, Geoclue and custom-widget chapters.

Both licences changed as well. The text moved from CC BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0, and the sample code from the LGPL v3 to MIT.

Earlier editions

Versions 0.03 to 0.13, from December 2008 to October 2012, covered PyGTK and GTK 2: widgets and layout, Glade and libglade, Cairo, printing, GConf and desktop integration, GStreamer, D-Bus, Clutter, embedded Mozilla and Internet Explorer, internationalization, and IronPython with Gtk#.

That edition is preserved in the git history of this repository, and the last PDF built from the LyX source is pygtk-notebook-latest-0.13.pdf.