Toga

Why Toga?

Toga isn’t the world’s first widget toolkit - there are dozens of other options. So why build a new one?

Native widgets - not themes

Toga uses native system widgets, not themes. When you see a Toga app running, it doesn’t just look like a native app - it is a native app. Applying an operating system-inspired theme over the top of a generic widget set is an easy way for a developer to achieve a cross-platform goal, but it leaves the end user with the mess.

It’s easy to spot apps that have been built using themed widget sets - they’re the ones that don’t behave quite like any other app. Widgets don’t look quite right, or there’s a menu bar on a window in an macOS app. Themes can get quite close - but there are always telltale signs.

On top of that, native widgets are always faster than a themed generic widget. After all, you’re using native system capability that has been tuned and optimized, not a drawing engine that’s been layered on top of a generic widget. They also inherit all of the native platform's accesibility affordances, such as support for screen readers and adaptive font sizes.

Abstract the broad concepts

It’s not enough to just look like a native app, though - you need to feel like a native app as well.

A “Quit” option under a “File” menu makes sense if you’re writing a Windows app - but it’s completely out of place if you’re on OS X - the Quit option should be under the application menu.

And besides - why did the developer have to code the location of a Quit option anyway? Every app in the world has to have a quit option, so why doesn’t the widget toolkit provide a quit option pre-installed, out of the box?

Although Toga uses 100% native system widgets, that doesn’t mean Toga is just a wrapper around system widgets. Wherever possible, Toga attempts to abstract the broader concepts underpinning the construction of GUI apps, and build an API for that. So - every Toga app has the basic set of menu options you’d expect of every app - Quit, About, and so on - all in the places you’d expect to see them in a native app.

When it comes to widgets, sometimes the abstraction is simple - after all, a button is a button, no matter what platform you’re on. But other widgets may not be exposed so literally. What the Toga API aims to expose is a set of mechanisms for achieving UI goals, not a literal widget set.

Python native

Most widget toolkits start their life as a C or C++ layer, which is then wrapped by other languages. As a result, you end up with APIs that taste like C or C++.

Toga has been designed from the ground up to be a Python native widget toolkit. This means the API is able to exploit language level features like generators and context managers in a way that a wrapper around a C library wouldn’t be able to (at least, not easily).

Toga runs on Python 3. It does not run on Python 2.

pip install and nothing more

Toga aims to be no more than a pip install away from use. It doesn’t require the compilation of C extensions. There’s no need to install a binary support library. There’s no need to change system paths and environment variables. Just install it, import it, and start writing (or running) code.

Embrace mobile

10 years ago, being a cross-platform widget toolkit meant being available for Windows, OS X and Linux. These days, mobile computing is much more important. But despite this, there aren’t many good options for Python programming on mobile platforms, and cross-platform mobile coding is still elusive. Toga aims to correct this.