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Should you be using QT for Python as a GUI?

Part seven of an eight-part series of blogs

If you need to build a GUI system in Python, PyQt5 is probably the best choice, but don't take our word for it - read this blog and see what you think.

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 June 2022

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CSS and Formatting

By far the easiest way to attach formatting to the widgets of a form is using a cascading style sheet. Here we have a simple form with absolutely no formatting:

The form looks drab, but CSS will sort this out.

For the title at the top of the form saying that CSS is great, we've added this dynamic property:

I probably should have mentioned that you can add your own properties to widgets earlier!

You could now create a style sheet - here's mine:

This style sheet sets a default Verdana 14 point font for all widgets, then sets specific formatting for QT labels, push buttons and any widgets to which we've attached the class h1_title.

You can then apply this in your code:

# opens style sheet and returns string of text containing CSS

with open(r"temp.css") as css_file:

css = css_file.read()

# apply CSS

self.setStyleSheet(css)

This is what would appear when you run your form and click on the button:

In retrospect I should have put a bit more effort into making the styles look nice! Notice that the title appears in a different font size, because it has its dynamic property class set to h1_title.

This ability to attach CSS style sheets to GUI forms is a big selling-point to me for PyQt5.

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