The structure of a QT Application

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A basic QT Application (with a widget)

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You will create your first Window in this application.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
from PyQt4.QtGui  import *
from PyQt4.QtCore import *

app = QApplication(sys.argv)

win = QWidget()
win.show()

sys.exit(app.exec_())

Did you notice the differences? You did less and got more. But don’t let this fool you. KDE requires this information, but from now on, i doesn’t get any more complicated in KDE than in pure Qt.

Maybe you did spot what we did now and didn’t do earlier: We constructed a widget and showed it. Clicking on the standard “x”-button it closes the whole application by default, but you can change that, of course. You can now transfer the widget-code into the KDE application but you wouldn’t want to write KDE applications if you didn’t want to use KDE’s features, do you?

Let’s move on, but without wasting space: I will leave out everything redundant now, you should keep it in your script, though. Everything we care about now is what we can do between these two lines:

win = QWidget()
win.show()

What about using our window as a frame for other widgets?

In order to do that, we will need a so-called layout and add our widgets to it:

win = QWidget()

layout = QVBoxLayout()
layout.addWidget(QLabel("This is a Label showing text,<br> but it can contain a Picture instead"))
layout.addWidget(QPushButton("Push me"))

win.setLayout(layout)
win.show()

What have we done? Quite something, I guess. We have:

  • Created and shown our widget, as we did before
  • Created a layout which stacks widgets vertically (VBox) and told the widget to use it
  • Added two more widgets to it, both containing text. (As you can see, the QLabel even supports HTML-stuff like the <br>-linebreak)