A common front-end to PySide and PyQt4

With this module, you can import the QtGui and QtCore submodules from qt_helpers, and it will automatically pick one between PyQt4 and PySide:

from qt_helpers import QtGui, QtCore

By default, qt_helpers will first try and import from PyQt4, then PySide. To explicitly force which backend package to use, you can set the QT_API environment variable to 'pyqt' or 'pyside'.

Note that when using qt_helpers, the QString API is always set to version 2.

If you want to know which backend is being used, you can use the is_pyqt() and is_pyside() functions.

Finally, a convenience load_ui(filename) function is provided to load Qt .ui files, e.g.:

from qt_helpers import load_ui
ui = load_ui('mywidget.ui')

If you define any custom widgets that are used in the .ui file, you should pass them as a list or tuple to load_ui using the custom_widgets= argument.