Asynchronisation Usage in PySimpleGUI

We use this design pattern for projects that actually will need to poll or output something on a regular basis. In this case, we’re indicating we want a timeout=10 in our window.read
call. Also, this will cause the call to return a “timeout key” as the event every 10 milliseconds has passed without some GUI thing happening first. The timeout key is PySimpleGUI.TIMEOUT_KEY which is usually written as sg.TIMEOUT_KEY in normal PySimpleGUI code.

Please be cautious when you are using windows with a timeout. You will rarely need to use a timeout=0 . A zero value is a non-blocking call, so we need not try to abuse this design pattern.
A short note about timers is that this is not a good design for a stopwatch as it can easily drift. This would never pass for a nice solution in a bit of commercial code. For better accuracy, we should always get the actual time from a reputable source, maybe from the operating system. We can use that as what you use to measure and display the time.

To understand it, we will implement a Stopwatch in Python using PySimpleGUI.

import PySimpleGUI as sg

sg.theme('SandyBeach')

layout = [  [sg.Text('Stopwatch', size =(20, 2), justification ='center')],
            [sg.Text(size =(10, 2), font =('Arial', 20), justification ='center', key ='-OUTPUT-')],
            [sg.T(' ' * 5), sg.Button('Start / Stop', focus = True), sg.Quit()]]

window = sg.Window('Stopwatch Timer', layout)

timer_running, counter = True, 0

# Event Loop
while True:

    # Please try and use as high of a timeout value as you can
    event, values = window.read(timeout = 10)

    # if user closed the window using X or clicked Quit button
    if event in (None, 'Quit'):
        break
    elif event == 'Start / Stop':
        timer_running = not timer_running
    if timer_running:
        window['-OUTPUT-'].update('{:02d}:{:02d}.{:02d}'.format((counter // 100) // 60,
                                                 (counter // 100) % 60, counter % 100))
        counter += 1
window.close()

Output