Here’s a way to use getopt to handle arguments when creating command line applications. It works quite well with the standard help (–help or -h) by showing usage when bad arguments are passed.

Python’s keyring lib supports Windows win32crypto, Mac OS X’s SXKeychain, KDE’s KWallet, Gnome’s keyring, and encrypted or unencrypted password files. When your application wants to store or fetch data from the keyring, it will just work.

It’s all about the design of the language and I agree with the author completely when he says, “Most languages have so much friction and awkwardness built into their design.”

I like it. It’s so simple and flexible. Define it with none, then assign sys.argv in place of argv.

Run system commands or call a sub-process and assign the return value to a variable. This makes it easy to pass the error up to your processes parent.

After your done building your wx objects and you’re ready to show it and call MainLoop(), wrap your main loop where you actually instantiate your gui objects in try/accept statements so that you can really catch any errors by calling the “show_errors()” function to launch a new message window where the errors will get displayed. This lets you catch errors before your whole program dies (causing errors to get lost).

Tail a file in Python

def tail( f, window=20 ):
f.seek( 0, 2 )
bytes= f.tell()
size= window
block= -1
while size > 0 and bytes+block*1024 > 0:
…

I didn’t find a glade template for this one, but I’m starting to lean away from using a gui builder. It seems more trouble than it’s worth.

I like wxPython a lot more than the other gui tooltkits i’ve tried. I’m finding it really easy to keep it from getting cluttered, and it’s easy to pick up and run with, but there’s some demo’s like this one below, that i’ve seen in various forms all over the place now, that I think are a waste of time. Why would you have a app that has nothing but a menu bar? You wouldn’t, so doesn’t it make sense to get the confusing parts of gui code out of the way? Namely, layout and events.

This is useful if you need to look at the last arguments before deciding what to do, possibly for interoperability with some older code where the order of command line arguments is already set in stone.