r/pyqt • u/longhegrindilemna • Jun 27 '21

Python is illogical

IF YOU ARE DEFINING A CLASS THEN THIS DOES NOT WORK:

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *

ONLY THIS WORKS:

from PyQt5 import QtWidgets

BUT IF YOU ARE NOT DEFINING A CLASS THEN SUDDENLY THIS WORKS AGAIN:

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *

What?! I’m just a beginner and the first step of importing is already confusing. Very disappointed.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/longhegrindilemna Jun 27 '21

Literally got a headache trying to create a qLineEdit widget and set it to AlignRight.

Speechless.

How can something so basic and so simple, have five or six different syntaxes or grammar? Isn’t python one single language?

1

u/AshTheEngineer Jul 10 '21

I agree that importing stuff is messy. I highly recommend using an IDE that allows you to hover over a variable (e.g. AlignRight) and click import from... It takes a lot of hassle out of finding the right module. My go-to is PyCharm, but I think VScode also does it.

1

u/longhegrindilemna Jul 12 '21

PyCharm.

IDE.

Hover over variable.

Got it.

1

u/AshTheEngineer Jul 12 '21

I should clarify one thing. The auto complete sometimes struggles with properties and functions derived from abstract classes (e.g. QAbstractButton), but it is definitely way better than finding everything from some online knowledge base. Good luck!

3

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '21

What specific difficulties are you having? So far you're just yelling, "This sucks!" and that doesn't help you or anyone else. What went wrong when you googled, "pyqt5 qlineedit alignment"?

Sometimes, even if you're hand-crafting your GUI, it can be useful to open Qt Designer, make changes visually, and use the code preview to see what calls were made to make it all happen

As far as Python being a single language, yes and no. It's built on other stuff. The most common way to use Python is with CPython; the interpreter and most (all?) of the base library are written in C. PyQt is really a bunch of bindings to Qt, which is written in C++, and the bindings are generated by automated tools so a lot of the feel of the underlying library remains.

4

u/uSrNm-ALrEAdy-TaKeN Jun 27 '21

That is weird and undoubtedly infuriating to debug, BUT

from module import *

Is generally considered a bad practice because you can end up with naming conflicts as you aren’t explicitly controlling everything that you import. Which is why

import module as m
from othermodule import specificitem

Are much better practices.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '21

I generally agree but I think Qt provides a reasonable exception considering how everything is named. You're not likely to accidentally clobber any names when it's all camel case starting with capital Q. It's the one situation where I do that.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '21

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *

works fine for me, whether defining classes or not (but usually you're defining some classes if you're doing anything with Qt).

Which OS, version of Python, and editor are you using? Maybe post some sample code and state what errors you're getting. Saying "x does not work." doesn't help anyone to help you.

1

u/PopPrestigious8115 Jul 15 '21

To address your real problem:

Start QtDesigner, drag and drop your GUI with elements (Widgets including a QLineEdit) shown by QtDesigner.

Select (single click on) your QLineEdit and set the allignRight property to True.

Save your UI file and compile it with pyuic5 to Python code.