CTk Maker v1.0 — a visual builder for customtkinter (drag-and-drop UI designer with code export)

[kandelucky]

Hey everyone,

I've been building a visual builder for customtkinter over the last 17 days. v1.0 is out today, and I'll keep working actively on it for the next several days adding more features.

Install:

pip install ctkmaker

Repo: https://github.com/kandelucky/ctk_maker

Features:

• 20 widgets in the palette (buttons, frames, tabview, scrollable frame, segmented button, etc.)
• Layout managers (place, vbox, hbox, grid)
• Multi-document workspace (main window + dialogs)
• Custom font system (import .ttf or pick from system fonts, with cascade defaults)
• Asset system — projects are portable, exports include relative paths
• 1700+ icons built in (with tinting + size selection)
• Live preview (Ctrl+R)
• Clean Python code export
• Object Tree, History panel, full undo/redo
• Right-click context menus throughout

My goal was to make it feel like Unity3D — building an app visually, not writing one. That's the workflow I'm used to from my game dev background, and I missed it when working with Python GUIs.

Honest disclosure: I don't write the code myself. Claude does. I'm the architect — I design the UX, decide the features, test the program.

Would love your feedback. What's missing? What would you want to see in v1.1?

[kandelucky]

Update — closing in on v2.0 (currently 1.9.9). A lot has shipped in the 5 days since this post.

Sharing one bug + workaround in case anyone hits the same wall:

CTkButton with high corner_radius grows past width × height when it has any text. A single character or even a space is enough; an empty button stays at the configured size. In a row of four 60×60 circular keys, the first one turns into a wide pill and overlaps the next column.

Fix — subclass CTkButton and lift the corner-area reservation in _draw. The patched class is now inlined into every .py CTk Maker exports, so generated apps render correctly without a custom CTk build.

for i, t in enumerate(("C", "(", "%", "÷")):
    ctk.CTkButton(app, width=60, height=60, corner_radius=30,
                  text=t).place(x=20 + i * 70, y=30)
# vanilla → first button overflows. text="" → all four render correctly.

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Highlights since v1.0:

• Component library — save any selection as a .ctkcomp and drop it into another window; bundled assets + variables travel with it
• Community Hub — kandelucky.github.io/ctkmaker-hub — landing page + browseable component library, free + MIT
• Project-level variables with property binding (StringVar / IntVar / DoubleVar / BooleanVar exported automatically)
• Multi-page projects — folder-based, open by picking the project folder instead of hunting for the right .ctkproj
• Window/Dialog as a component — bundle a whole Toplevel and reuse it across projects
• Per-document snap & alignment toggles, right-click "Add Widget" cascade, redesigned palette
• Patched CircleButton, plus several smaller export and properties-panel fixes

Repo: https://github.com/kandelucky/ctk_maker
Hub: https://kandelucky.github.io/ctkmaker-hub/
Wiki / docs: https://github.com/kandelucky/ctk_maker/wiki

Feedback still very welcome — what's missing in v2.0?