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An update on the progress of our PyQt5 editor
What happened to our PyQt5 editor? Well - not much, sadly. We've given up on this approach now and are reverting to a website solution - this blog explains why.

Posted by Andy Brown on 02 December 2022

In this blog

Where I left you
An update

An update on the progress of our PyQt5 editor

Or should that be ... lack of progress? I'm writing this blog because I don't want to give false confidence to any reader that PyQt5 and Python will solve this problem easily; they won't.

Where I left you

In July of this year (2022) I blogged enthusiastically that we were using PyQt5 and Python to create our much-needed HTML editor.

My tentative answer was: yes.

An update

However, after investing some weeks in this I decided to return to square one. There are three reasons why I've changed my mind:

Reason	Notes
Classes in Python	I find classes hard to work with in Python. The implementation is clunky, and there are so many things missing (just to pick one example, you can't create private fields in a class in Python). So although this has little to do with the PyQt5 interface, it proved more and more of a problem the further I got into Python coding.
Table widgets	PyQt5 has widgets like QTableViews which are specifically designed to display data, but I found them incredibly cumbersome to work with.
Basic design	I discussed the relative merits of a web-based or form-based system in my earlier blog, but think I came to the wrong conclusion! Although websites take longer to write, the advantage of just being able to call a URL to allow a user to edit HTML makes this the best solution.

An update: I eventually settled on using TipTap to create a web-based editor, a decision justified by the fact that the project is now actually complete! You can see the pain and pleasure of our TipTap development here.

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