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The Original PySimpleGUI Cookbook

Welcome to the PySimpleGUI Cookbook! It's provided as but one component of a larger documentation effort for the PySimpleGUI package. Its purpose is to give you a jump start.

You'll find that starting with a Recipe will give you a big jump-start on creating your custom GUI. Copy and paste one of these Recipes and modify it to match your requirements. Study them to get an idea of some design patterns to follow.

This document is not a replacement for the main documentation at http://www.PySimpleGUI.org. If you're looking for answers, they're most likely there in the detailed explanations and the detailed call reference. That document is updated much more frequently than this one.

See the main doc on installation. Typically it's pip install pysimplegui to install.

Constantly Being Updated

Because PySimpleGUI is an active project, new capabilities are being added frequently, and the recommended method for doing operations evolves over time, that means this Cookbook also changes over time. However, the speed the Cookbook gets updated will, by definition, lag behind the code changes.

*The Demo Programs are going to be the most up to date examples* for you, but even those get out of date. It's an imperfect world, but let's make the most of what we've got.

The "Demo Programs" Are Also "Recipes"

If you like this Cookbook, then you'll LOVE the 300 sample programs that are just like these. You'll find them in the GitHub at http://Demos.PySimpleGUI.com. They are located in the folder DemoPrograms and there is also a Demo Programs folder for each of the PySimpleGUI ports.

These programs are updated frequently, much more so than this Cookbook document. It's there that you'll find the largest potential for a big jump-start on your project.

These short Demo Programs fall into 3 categories:

  1. Demonstrate a particular Element
  2. Integration with another package (e.g. Matplotlib, OpenCV, etc)
  3. Provide added functionality - more complex element combinations or extensions to elements

So, for example, if you're trying to use the Graph Element to create a line graph, check out the demo programs... there are 8 different demos for the Graph Element alone.

Because there are so many Demo Programs, there is a "Demo Program Browser". There is a Recipe in this Cookbook on how to download the Demo Programs and run the Demo Program Browser.

Repl.it... another online resource

The PySimpleGUI repl.it repository is also used, but it doesn't provide the same kind of capability to provide some explanatory text and screenshots with the examples. It does, however, automatically install the latest version of PySimpleGUI for many of the examples. It also enables the demo programs to access any package that can be pip installed. Trinket does not have this more expansive capability. Some older demos are located there. You can run PySimpleGUIWeb demos using Repl.it.

Cookbook Purpose

A quick explanation about this document. The PySimpleGUI Cookbook is meant to get you started quickly. But that's only part of the purpose. The other, probably most important one, is coding conventions. The more of these examples and the programs you see in the Demo Programs section on the GitHub, the more familiar certain patterns will emerge.

It's through the Cookbook and the Demo Programs that new PySimpleGUI constructs and naming conventions are "rolled out" to the user community. If you are brand new to PySimpleGUI, then you're getting your foundation here. That foundation changes over time as the package improves. The old code still runs, but as more features are developed and better practices are discovered, you'll want to be using newer examples and coding conventions.

PEP8 names are a really good example. Previously many of the method names for the Elements were done with CamelCase which is not a PEP8 compliant way of naming those functions. They should have been snake_case. Now that a complete set of PEP8 bindings is available, the method names are being changed here, in the primary documentation and in the demo programs. window.Read() became window.read(). It's better that you see examples using the newer windows.read() names.

In short, it's brainwashing you to program PySimpleGUI a certain way. The effect is that one person has no problem picking up the code from another PySimpleGUI programmer and recognizing it. If you stick with variable names shown here, like many other PySimpleGUI users have, then you'll understand other people's code (and the demos too) quicker. So far, the coding conventions have been used by most all users. It's improved efficiency for everyone.