Welcome to the Pyface Documentation!

Pyface contains toolkit-independent GUI abstraction layers, used to support the TraitsUI package. Thus, you can write code in the abstraction of the Pyface API and the selected toolkit and backend take care of the details of displaying them.

Pyface enables programmers to interact with generic GUI objects, such as an “Application Window”, rather than with raw GUI widgets. TraitsUI uses Pyface to implement views and editors for displaying and editing Traits-based objects. In addition to wrappers around fields and dialogs, Pyface includes an application framework called “Tasks” for building full-featured applications featuring dock panes, tabbed editor areas and so forth.

Toolkit Backends

Pyface defines APIs that are independent of any GUI toolkit. However, in order to actually produce user interfaces with them, you must install a supported Python-based GUI toolkit and the appropriate toolkit-specific backend project. Conversely, a “null” backend is automatically used in the absence of a real backend.

Currently, the GUI toolkits are

  • PySide2 and PySide6 (stable)

  • PyQt5 (stable) and PyQt6 (in development)

  • wxPython 4 (experimental)

NOTE: Although the code in this library is BSD licensed, when a PyQt backend is used, the more restrictive terms of PyQt’s GPL or proprietary licensing will likely apply to your code.

Toolkit Backend Selection

Selecting the backend to use is possible via the singleton object ETSConfig (importable from traits.etsconfig.api), which has a string attribute, toolkit, that signifies the GUI toolkit.

The supported values of ETSConfig.toolkit are:

  • ‘qt’ or ‘qt4’: PySide2, PySide6 or PyQt, which provide Python bindings for the Qt framework.

  • ‘wx’: wxPython 4, which provides Python bindings for the wxWidgets toolkit.

  • ‘null’: A do-nothing toolkit, for situations where neither of the other toolkits is installed.

The default behavior of Pyface is to search for available toolkit-specific packages in the order listed, and uses the first one it finds. The programmer or the user can override this behavior in any of several ways, in the following order of precedence:

  1. The program can explicitly set ETSConfig.toolkit. It must do this before importing from any other Enthought Tool Suite component, including traits. For example, at the beginning of a program:

    from traits.etsconfig.api import ETSConfig
ETSConfig.toolkit = 'wx'

  2. The user can define a value for the ETS_TOOLKIT environment variable.

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