What should I build a UI in?

Not sure why everyone here is responding with text editors / IDEs (for which I say: use whatever you like, they all work). It sounds like you want recommendations on a programming language / framework in order to build a GUI for your program (which I assume is currently a command line application / script).

There are a ton of reasonable choices here and it's hard to recommend one thing without more information. A few very important questions that will narrow down the field:

  • Are you looking to build a simple, locally installed application, e.g., everything is done on the host machine so no networking / central database is required? If so, and you don't care how it looks, it may make the most sense to build a simple UI in tkinter. You can also check out pyQT.

  • On the above point, if your app is extremely simple and you only need it to run on Windows, it may actually be easiest to learn how to build something in Autohotkey. You can learn how to build a simple local system tray app with a GUI that calls command line scripts fairly easily.

  • If you care about how things look, need a central database, and don't mind learning a thing or two about http, api design, setting up a server, etc., you should look into setting up a Flask/Django application and building a front-end web application with JS/HTML/CSS. Important note: it can take long time to learn all of this. I think it's possible to build JS/HTML/CSS desktop applications nowadays as well (e.g., in Visual Studio which you mentioned), but I don't know enough about this domain to comment, and I suspect they may only work on Windows, or may require more work to distribute on other OSs -- also not sure how easy it would be integrate with a python program.

  • Do you care about the skills that you get out of this? (If so, it is helpful to pick frameworks that are less "magical" and let you actually learn about what's going on. E.g., for Python web frameworks, pick Flask over Django).

  • Something to mention is that javascript has a HUGE ecosystem with a ton of frameworks to choose from. As others have mentioned, you can't go wrong starting with Bootstrap / Jquery. This is hands-down the best Jquery tutorial out there: http://try.jquery.com/. However, keep in mind that Jquery is the old approach to web apps (though learning it is worthwhile, because you will learn about the DOM). Depending on your goals, you may want to quickly move on to using React or Angular, which do away with jquery entirely.

/r/startups Thread