We use this design pattern for projects that actually will need to poll or output something on a regular basis. In this case, we’re indicating we want a timeout=10 in our window.read
call. Also, this will cause the call to return a “timeout key” as the event every 10 milliseconds has passed without some GUI thing happening first. The timeout key is PySimpleGUI.TIMEOUT_KEY which is usually written as sg.TIMEOUT_KEY in normal PySimpleGUI code.
Please be cautious when you are using windows with a timeout. You will rarely need to use a timeout=0 . A zero value is a non-blocking call, so we need not try to abuse this design pattern.
A short note about timers is that this is not a good design for a stopwatch as it can easily drift. This would never pass for a nice solution in a bit of commercial code. For better accuracy, we should always get the actual time from a reputable source, maybe from the operating system. We can use that as what you use to measure and display the time.
To understand it, we will implement a Stopwatch in Python using PySimpleGUI.
import PySimpleGUI as sg sg.theme('SandyBeach') layout = [ [sg.Text('Stopwatch', size =(20, 2), justification ='center')], [sg.Text(size =(10, 2), font =('Arial', 20), justification ='center', key ='-OUTPUT-')], [sg.T(' ' * 5), sg.Button('Start / Stop', focus = True), sg.Quit()]] window = sg.Window('Stopwatch Timer', layout) timer_running, counter = True, 0 # Event Loop while True: # Please try and use as high of a timeout value as you can event, values = window.read(timeout = 10) # if user closed the window using X or clicked Quit button if event in (None, 'Quit'): break elif event == 'Start / Stop': timer_running = not timer_running if timer_running: window['-OUTPUT-'].update('{:02d}:{:02d}.{:02d}'.format((counter // 100) // 60, (counter // 100) % 60, counter % 100)) counter += 1window.close() |
Output
