Welcome to clickqt

This is currently under active development between myself and a group of students

What is clickqt?

clickqt is a python package which turns click's CLIs into Qt-GUIs. Effectively, it turns

Usage: example_cli greet [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --userinfo <TEXT INTEGER DATETIME>...
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

into

Installation

The Python package clickqt can be installed from PyPI:

python -m pip install clickqt

Development installation

If you want to contribute to the development of clickqt, we recommend the following editable installation from this repository:

git clone git@github.com:dokempf/clickqt.git
cd clickqt
python -m pip install --editable .[tests]

Having done so, the test suite can be run using pytest:

python -m pytest

Usage

clickqt is designed to allow two ways of usage:

External

To use clickqt externally, you can run the entry point created by installing clickqt, called clickqtfy. There are two ways to use this entry point:

• clickqtfy ENTRYPOINT
  

This way works if you have an installed entry point.

• clickqtfy ENTRYPOINT FUNCNAME
  

In cases where there is no installed entry point, you can use this method instead, providing a path/filename for ENTRYPOINT and a function name within that file for FUNCNAME.

Wrapper with Entry Point

You can create entry points for clickqt in two steps:

• Create the control for the GUI as a variable (in a file named somefile.py in the top-level directory of package somepackage):

  from clickqt import qt_gui_from_click
  import click
  
  @click.command(...)
  def foo(...):
    pass
  
  ui_handle = qt_gui_from_click(foo)
  

• Then reference ui_handle in the gui_scripts section of your pyproject.toml file like this:

  [project.gui-scripts]
  gui = "somepackage.somefile:ui_handle"
  

After installing, you can run this entry point by typing gui in your console, create a desktop shortcut linked to it, etc..

Usage with gui information

If you decide to design your own click.type then it would be normally mapped to a simple Textfield, if you do not provide additional information in the form of a dictionary. It is important to note that the behaviour you want to invoke must also be provided by you, since the Qt-Widgets have different kind of getter and setter functions. This means that aside from you desired Qt-Widget you have to pass the getter function and the setter function for the customized type in a tuple, while your customized type is the key of the dictionary.

from clickqt import qt_gui_from_click
  import click

  @click.command(...)
  def foo(...):
    pass

  def custom_getter(widget: "CustomWidget"):
    assert isinstance(widget.widget, QSpinBox)
    return widget.widget.value()


  def custom_setter(widget: "CustomWidget", val):
      widget.widget.setValue(val)

  ui_handle = qt_gui_from_click(foo, {BasedIntParamType: (QSpinBox, custom_getter, custom_setter)})

This can be referenced externally via an option before the arguments:

clickqtfy --custom-gui [GUI] ENTRYPOINT

clickqtfy --custom-gui [GUI] ENTRYPOINT FUNCNAME

GUI in this case can be an entrypoint, created as described in Wrapper with Entrypoint or it is the ui_handle you used to create this entrypoint. With this you can map your own click types to specific QtWidgets of your choice if this is your choice.

Support

ClickQt also supports the click extension to structure options of click commands in option groups (https://click-option-group.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). This extension is supported by generating collapsible sections for the option groups to see the structuring of the options.

Limitations

Currently clickqt only supports the built-in features from click. This means that any user defined behaviour (e.g., custom ParamTypes / Commands / Contexts) will propably not work as expected. Furthermore, clickqt handles envvar options diffently from click. In particular clickqt always splits the envvar whereas click does this dependent on the ParamType. Future releases will take these issues into account. In the current stage of clickQt the special cases of option groups are not supported i.e MutuallyExclusiveOptionGroup (https://click-option-group.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#behavior-and-relationship-among-options).

Acknowledgments

This repository was set up using the SSC Cookiecutter for Python Packages.