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theRealProHacker / Positron

With Positron you can create your own desktop app using just HTML and Python
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desktop framework gui pygame python

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Positron

Positron is a python package that allows you to write simple and elegant HTML, CSS and Python code and have a desktop app running.

Why you should use it

You are tired of the ugliness of tkinter, already know web technologies and don't want to learn new frameworks like QT or Kivy and Electron is too slow for you then this is the perfect place to start!

How to get started

You need Python >= 3.10 and Git installed

git clone https://github.com/theRealProHacker/Positron.git
pip install Positron

There are some alternative installations for a live console, markdown support and to run the examples respectively

pip install Positron[console]
pip install Positron[markdown]
pip install Positron[examples]

Now you can create your project using Positron. For a good example with a step-by-step guide look here.

If you have any questions, don't be shy to ask a question

Alternatively, you can also install Positron using a virtual environment if you prefer.

Contributing

All contributions are highly welcome and everyone is able to make a contribution. For more information on how to contribute and raise security issues look into CONTRIBUTING.md

Visualization of the codebase

Uses repo-visualization by Amelia Wattenberger

Check out the live version

Visualization of the codebase

The Name

Electron is a very popular framework that gives a very similar promise. The idea is that you can write a desktop app with just HTML/CSS/JS - all of which a typical web developer is already familiar with.

Positron is a spin-off of on Electron and makes a pun off the fact that a positron is the physical anti-matter to an electron. Also, Electron uses ECMAScript and Positron uses Python

I initially thought the name was really brilliant and original until I randomly searched for Positron and found like 5 other projects with the same name. One of them an Electron clone by Mozilla 😂.

Why Electron doesn't work

You can use Electron that calls python code. However, the problems of Electron are well known.

Specifically, Electron creates a server and a Chromium client that communicate per IPC. This makes Electron both relatively slow and also it uses huge amounts of memory. Apps that use Electron like VSCode or Discord pretty quickly add up to GBs of RAM usage. 4GB vanish quickly when you for example have 2 Browsers and 2 Electron apps open. When the OS has little RAM left it will start swapping RAM in and out of disk and this will make your whole computer lag a lot.

Also, Electron has pretty slow load times. If you start any other regular app (a Flutter app for example), it seems like it opens almost instantly. However, Electron takes a few seconds to load and it really becomes obvious to the user.

Apart from this little thing, Electron is really great, if you know how to use it.

Sources

MVPs