Can I request you use Qt? Thanks

I was considering Qt but decided to use Kivy[0]. Why do you think I should use Qt?

[0] - http://kivy.org

I've never heard of Kivy before, but judging purely from the gallery on that page, my first impression is that I see no screenshots of any native-looking desktop apps. Unless that's just an omission in the gallery, that would be a good reason to use Qt.

It's true that Kivy's widgets are not native and Qt's are. Would that be a sufficient reason for you to not use the app?

Here is my reason for Qt. Qt won the Linux tool kit wars (My opinion) and it is used by so many projects that it keeps the ecosystem more standardized. Plus when I am at work on my one Windows box I like seeing Qt on there also.

Ok, I'll look into Qt licensing wrt commercial Python apps and will consider using Qt if there are no issues.

There's LGPL PySide (http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide) which should be suitable for commercial projects under LGPL, but PySide is Qt4 only. There is also PyQt (http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/license) with Qt5 support, but its free license is GPL-only, so if you're not doing open source, it's not going to work, unless you buy their commercial license.

BTW, Zeal's original author here - thanks for mentioning Zeal and good luck with your project!

As some personal advice, I wouldn't try Kivy for such content-oriented desktop app. I've tried briefly using it once for doing a very simple application, but it seemed much harder to implement usual desktop-like widgets. Overall it looks like it's good for graphics-rich and custom-rendered applications.

You'll also need some HTML rendering engine for docsets. While there are Kivy projects like https://github.com/kivy-garden/garden.cefpython or https://github.com/kivy/kivy-berkelium aiming to provide exactly that, they don't seem very mature.

However, I don't claim to be Kivy expert at all, and maybe you'll have good experience with it.

Thanks for the info and advice. Much appreciated!