Qt5

Sometime after making a GUI programme to help a friend run a trivia game (I guess beginning of last year), I started looking into Qt5 because I was having problems with certain Unicode characters causing Tkinter to either crash or screw with displayed text. Might've been other reasons, but it's so long ago that I don't remember.

I learned it by converting my Tkinter programmes, and it was fairly easy to learn since I already had learned a lot of the logic from Tkinter. I think it might've been a couple weeks before I fell in love with Qt5. Anyway, there was a lot of learning and having to go back to programmes I previously converted to add/fix stuff.

Also I think around this time I also learned classes better, which made things easier to do.

It probably was after a couple or so months that I kinda lost steam to convert all the Tkinter programmes (probably because I hardly ever used the last couple I had to left convert) and just moved onto new projects. One of those projects was having a programme that helps me do stuff in EAGLE CAD in the sense that I can plug values into it and it spits out the value I'm looking for. I do know that EAGLE has ULPs, but that's a C-like language and not Python. Anyway, the reason for this is that it was time consuming to draw the parts of the board layout in Fusion 360 to get a value (sometimes having to do this multiple times), and it really is just all mathematics in the end. Also, I'm sticking with EAGLE 7.7.0 btw because it's annoying to have to login for the free version of EAGLE 8+, especially if I'm needing to just look at something real quick.

Anyway, each calculation I made into its own class and then used the main class to place it in the category it belongs to for display. It took a while to figure out how to arrange all the classes without making the window too large, and I ended up finding QScrollArea that really helped keep the width of the programme minimal. After a couple months of working on it (and still not being done), I decided to just leave it for now, since everything within it works and I have around 4000 lines of code. Yeah, I should probably break the classes into their own modules instead, but I don't really feel like working on it regardless.

What it currently looks like.
The precision selection, Ω button, and µ button was added later (the buttons put the corresponding symbols on the clipboard). (Also Qt5 allows for clipboard reading/writing, which is really nice.)

I've also done a world clock sort of programme that utilises QDateTime and QTimeZone, which I think are better than Python's built-in date/time/timezone solution? There's also QTimer which allows a function to be ran after the set timer expires (which is used in said world clock programme to update the time display every second instead of using a while loop and time.sleep(), also you can stop a QTimer with code but not time.sleep()). At this point, I forgot what Tkinter provided that Qt5 doesn't, but I've long adapted to it with a lot of the other things Qt5 provides. It also has its own multi-threading framework, which I think is also easier to use than Python's, especially if I've been using it here and there for things that can really leverage multiple threads.

It was earlier this year when Qt6 was released, and I decided to poke with it a bit since I probably should move to it, but ran into issues on one of the programmes I converted as a test. There were some name changes (QRegExp → QRegularExpression) or ways to access certain items (QMessageBox.Ok → QMessageBox.StandardButtons.Ok), and when I got everything fixed up, it worked... except for the theme. I use a weird mixture of qt5ct and Kvantum, and just couldn't figure out how to stylise/theme Qt6 to match.

Qt5 with the style/theme I have set, Qt6 default style/theme (I'm assuming).

And speaking of name changes, when I was trying to load the Qt6 version of the programme, I ran into more errors because of more name changes (QMessageBox.StandardButtons.Ok → QMessageBox.StandardButton.Ok and Qt.Alignment.AlignCenter → Qt.AlignmentFlag.AlignCenter) (frustration noises here). Anyway I dunno when Qt5 will be end of life, but it probably won't be for at least a few years, and hopefully whenever the time comes, Qt6 will have the maturity that Qt5 currently has.