Gooey (Beta)

Turn (almost) any Console Program into a GUI application with one line

Table of Contents

• Gooey
• Table of contents
• What It Is
• Why Is It
• Who is this for
• How does it work
• Configuration
  • Full/Advanced
  • Basic
  • No Config
• Final Screen
• Installation Instructions
• TODO
• Contributing
• Image Credits

What is it?

Gooey converts your Console Applications into end-user friendly GUI applications. It lets you focus on building robust, configurable programs in a familiar way, all without having to worry about how it will be presented to and interacted with by your average user.

Why?

Because as much as we love the command prompt, the rest of the world looks at it like some ugly relic from the '80s. On top of that, more often than not programs need to do more than just one thing, and that means giving options, which previously meant either building a GUI, or trying to explain how to supply arguments to a Console Application. Gooey was made to (hopefully) solve those problems. It makes programs easy to use, and pretty to look at!

Who is this for?

If you're building utilities for yourself, other programmers, or something which produces a result that you want capture and pipe over to another console application (e.g. common *nix style utils), Gooey probably isn't the tool for you. However, if you're building 'run and done,' around the office style scripts, things that shovel bits from point A to point B, or simply something that'll be used by a non-programmer, Gooey is the perfect tool for the job. It lets you build as complex of an application as your heart desires all while getting the GUI side for free.

How does it work?

Gooey is attached to your code via a simple decorator on your main method.

@gooey      <--- all it takes! :)
def main():
  # rest of code

At runtime, it loads the Abstract Syntax Tree for your module and parses it for all references to ArgumentParser (The older optparse is currently not supported). These references are then extracted, assigned a component type based on the 'action' they provide, and finally used to assemble the GUI.

Currently, the ArgumentParser._actions are mapped to the following WX components.

Parser Action	WxWidget
store	TextCtrl
store_const	CheckBox
store_true	CheckBox
store_False	CheckBox
append	TextCtrl
count	DropDown
choice	DropDown

---

###Configuration

Gooey comes in three main flavors.

• Full/Advanced
• Basic
• No config

And each with the following options:

Parameter	Summary
language	Gooey is (kind of) international ready. All program text is stored in an external json file. Translating to your host language only requires filling in the key/value pairs.
program_name	The name displayed in the title bar of the GUI window. If the value is None, the title is pulled from sys.argv[0].
program_description	Sets the text displayed in the top panel of the Settings screen. If None the decription is pulled from the ArgumentParser.

###Advanced

The default view is the "full" or "advanced" configuration screen, and is toggled via the advanced parameter in the Gooey decorator.

@gooey(advanced=True)
def main():
    # rest of code   

This view presents each action in the Argument Parser as a unique GUI component. This view is ideal for presenting the program to users which are unfamiliar with command line options and/or Console Programs in general. Help messages are displayed along side each component to make it as clear as possible which each widget does.

---

###Basic

The basic view is best for times when the user is familiar with Console Applications, or the options are very simple, but you still want to present something a little more polished than a simple terminal. The basic display is accessed by setting the advanced parameter in the gooey decorator to False.

@gooey(advanced=False)
def main():
    # rest of code  

---

###No Config

No Config pretty much does what you'd expect: it doesn't show a configuration screen. It hops right to the display section and begins execution of the host program. This is the guy for classing up the delivery of little one-off scripts.

---

Final Screen

---

Installation instructions

To install Gooey, simply clone the project to your local directory

git clone https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey.git

TODO

• Add to pypi
• Themes
• Add ability to customize the mapping between Parser actions and wxComponents. For instance, if your program had a file as a required argument, it'd be far more useful to the end user to supply a wx.FileDialog rather than a simple TextBox.
• update graphics
• robustify parser
• Optparse support?
• Get OS X version working.

Wanna help?

• Do you art? I'd love to swap out the graphics to something more stylistically unified.
• Programmer? Pull requests are super welcome. The projects style is fantastically inconsistent, though. So be warned :) I tried to follow the WxWidgets style of Leading Capital methods and CamelCased variables, but.. Python habits die hard. So, there are underscores littered all over the place.

Image Credits