hello_world.py demonstrated the bare minimum of code to get a Qt window on the screen, but it's a bit too simplistic to serve as a model for more complex applications. In this book, we're going to be creating many PyQt applications, so, to make things easier, we're going to compose a basic application template. Future chapters will refer to this template, so make sure to create it exactly as specified.

Open a new file called qt_template.py, and add in these imports:

import sys
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets as qtw
from PyQt5 import QtGui as qtg
from PyQt5 import QtCore as qtc

We'll start with importing sys, so that we can pass QApplication an actual list of script arguments; then we'll import our three main Qt modules. To save some typing, while avoiding star imports, we're going to alias them to abbreviated names...