Introduction

python-ugtk is a functional layer upon PyGobject. The purpose of this is to provide a different perspective to GUI programming towards more maintanable, clean and organized code.

The ugtk layer is based on the concept of actions. An ugtk action is a series of directives that can be performed over gtk widgets, usually by calling their methods, setting their properties or hooking callbacks to their signals and so on. Each widget class determines a set of actions that it support, so the set of availables actions for each widget is based on its inheritance.

To apply actions you must use a ugtk method, by specifying a kwargs for each action (where the key is the action name, the value the action argument). There are currently two of them:

ugtk.new(gtkclass, **actions)

ugtk.set(gtkwidget, **actions)

ugtk.add(gtkwidget, **actions)

The first is used when you have no widget yet and you want it created. The second serves only the purpose of applying actions.

Actions change their behaviour depending on the ugtk method used to perform them. For example, specifiying children=list action on a Gtk.HBox object using ugtk.add() is different from using ugtk.set() (the later will reset the box childrens, while the former will always append).

Some actions are available for both methods (e.g. text=str is provided both for ugtk.new() and ugtk.add() with Gtk.Label -- which actually calls gtk.Label.set_text(str)). Others are only available for each method. Some actions for both methods may behave differently depending on which method they are being applied from.

To better organize actions we can group them by functionality:

set actions

Actions that in will eventually call widget.set_ACTIONNAME or similar on methods passing their arguments.

wrapper actions

Actions that generate a series of methods calls on the widget. E.g. gtkset(hbox, child_tight=[label, entry]) will call gtk.Box.pack_start(0, label) and gtk.Box.pack_start(0, entry).

To provide a functional paradigm each ugtk method returns the widget being manipulated, so users can do things like:

win = ugtk.new(
    Gtk.Window,
    title="ugtk 'Hello, World' window",
    connect={'delete-event': Gtk.main_quit }
)

ugtk.set(
    win,
    child=ugtk.new(
        Gtk.VBox,
        children=[
            ugtk.new(
                Gtk.Label,
                text="Hello, World!"
            ),
            (
                ugtk.new(Gtk.Button,
                         label="Close",
                         connect={
                             'clicked':
                             lambda widget: win.close()
                         }),
                { 'expand': False }
            ),
        ],
        expand=True
    )
)

Gtk.main()
del win