building graphical user interface with tons of lines of text , without a graphical IDE, is for me a non sense in 2025 …
There are online GUI builders available. Here’s one: PyUi builder.
But, it’s not integrated and the output is, as you say, tons of lines of text.
I’m simply sharing some alternatives, but I get it. Xojo spoiled us with a great 80% solution.
Java does it also: 80% solution like Xojo for Desktop. That makes it harder to work with pyton
tons of lines of text is not that bad, because today llm’s can generate these with ease.
but I don’t get it that people build GUI builders, and don’t use it.
at least xojo is build with xojo …
I don’t blame your post in particular, you’re welcome to share these informations.
but I’ve seen here on this forum lots of try to replace xojo, and each time you end up with something not graphical build IDE and it sucks ! (for me at least)
So which do you want ?
An IDE that mostly mimics the UI’s it claims to build for but isnt QUITE accurate
But its graphical
And buggy
Or one that doesnt have as many bugs in the IDE or frameworks and previews its output in the emulator (more or less live depending on the tool set) so its at least a lot closer to what you will get in the end
Those are the choices I’ve ended up using
TBH I’m in the second camp now because I like knowing that the bugs I’m encountering (esp on Android) are 99.9% of the time my making
I literally have a Xojo android app that now crashes in selecting a line in a table
I kid you not
Same app has also experienced
https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/79261
https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/79262
https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/79259
And nearly EVERY one of these bugs is reported based on experience with this one app
https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/?sort=created_date&state=all&author_username=normanpalardy&label_name[]=Android&first_page_size=100
Desktop ? Xojo is much better than their current Android effort but thats a VERY low bar to set
Web ? meh - some stuff is ok but it doesnt scale well without special set up (and thank god Tim has made Life Boat to make that simple to do & that Greg made it work on Xojo Cloud)
NOW - would I like to see Xojo be better ?
YES - of course
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I did not say that xojo is perfect ! far from it ! but it suits my needs, better than anything else I tried.
ps: and I don’t do android on xojo…
ps2: and I am on macos mainly (seems many more bugs on windows xojo ?)
I’m on macOS and find bugs in the IDE all the time
I’ve regularly had code editing sessions where when I finally hit run the jumbled mess its made of methods that I’ve worked on necessitates a “Revert to saved” because the code editor has completely garbled the code in one or more methods
I cant reproduce it on demand but its done this so much more frequently lately than it EVER did before that I honestly resort to editing text projects in BBEDit and then
“Revert to Saved” in the newest IDEs as I just dont trust them
So I have this huge IDE that I use to draw a layout and compile
Everything else is in BBEdit
And its faster to do many things in BBEdit than it is in the IDE
Want to add 50 constants in the IDE ?
In BBEdit it takes me much less than 50 cmd-opt-C type name, enter value, cmd-opt-c etc
An Enumeration ?
Seconds in BBedit
The GUI editor for a desktop is about the ONLY advantage
And given the experience I have in other tools now not sure its that significant
But, until you try, you cant know
If you’re mainly targeting macOS, you should look at Apple’s Xcode and Swift, you can use their GUI builder with AppKit integration or code the UI with SwiftUI. There’s a ton of training material and forums and social media for getting help with the code.
If you do decide to go SwiftUI, you can build a Mac app that works on iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, VisionOS and Android (via 3rd party), all from the same project.
I wrote a little SwiftUI tutorial recently if you’re interested. SwiftUI Markdown Editor Tutorial - Ohanaware.com
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SwiftUI for iOS & Android ?
Sheesh yet more choices to check out 
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While SwiftUI is an Apple API for Apple devices only, someone started a Project that brings the API’s capabilities to other platforms like Linux.
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More interested iOS & Android
Might have to poke at that
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This is the 3rd party that enables Android from SwiftUI.
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mainly means I sometimes go wild with windows and linux… so swift not really for me ?
AFAIK Swift isn’t used for Desktop Windows or Linux, it is used on Windows and Linux servers, probably more so than Xojo (due to the much larger user base).
At some point you may ask yourself, do I want to build the best Mac app I can, or not.
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If you are using Py and want to build robust UI please check out this fantastic tool called Anvil. It allow one to build powerful web app using only Py.
For building desktop app I would prefer to use Delphi and integrate the opensource library Python4Delphi.
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If you’re only interested in desktop there’s quite a few options for drag-and-drop designers for Python:
Tkinter - pygubu
wxPython - wxGlade
PyGTK - Glade
Qt for Python - pyside-designer
As for BeeWare, although it’s progressing fast since Anaconda starting financing it, it’s still early days so I guess it will be a while before there’s a visual GUI builder for Toga.
Delphi would be nice
If only they didnt have 2 different UI frameworks and the IDE uses the old one that is not x-platform
Then they could make a Mac version (like they once actually said they were working on way way way back after they transitioned the IDE to 64 bit (thats was more than a decade ago)
But Delphi at the end. Extremely expensive and from so many reasons remembering to a company from texas
Oh indeed I’ve long given up thinking they might ever get their shit together
Delphi has changed hands a few times and I think the current owners just dont give a shit
Hmmmm … 
That’s what I meant. Sounds similar to the green guys from texas…