Updating GUI elements in MultiThreaded PyQT

Here some very basic examples.

You can pass references to GUI elements to threads, and update them in thread.

import sys
import urllib2

from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui


class DownloadThread(QtCore.QThread):
    def __init__(self, url, list_widget):
        QtCore.QThread.__init__(self)
        self.url = url
        self.list_widget = list_widget

    def run(self):
        info = urllib2.urlopen(self.url).info()
        self.list_widget.addItem('%s\n%s' % (self.url, info))


class MainWindow(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__()
        self.list_widget = QtGui.QListWidget()
        self.button = QtGui.QPushButton("Start")
        self.button.clicked.connect(self.start_download)
        layout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout()
        layout.addWidget(self.button)
        layout.addWidget(self.list_widget)
        self.setLayout(layout)

    def start_download(self):
        urls = ['http://google.com', 'http://twitter.com', 'http://yandex.ru',
                'http://stackoverflow.com/', 'http://www.youtube.com/']
        self.threads = []
        for url in urls:
            downloader = DownloadThread(url, self.list_widget)
            self.threads.append(downloader)
            downloader.start()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = MainWindow()
    window.resize(640, 480)
    window.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

Editors Note: Qt widgets are not thread safe and should not be accessed from any thread but the main thread (see the Qt documentation for more details). The correct way to use threads is via signals/slots as the second part of this answer shows.

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Also, you can use signals and slots, to separate gui and network logic.

import sys
import urllib2

from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui


class DownloadThread(QtCore.QThread):

    data_downloaded = QtCore.pyqtSignal(object)

    def __init__(self, url):
        QtCore.QThread.__init__(self)
        self.url = url

    def run(self):
        info = urllib2.urlopen(self.url).info()
        self.data_downloaded.emit('%s\n%s' % (self.url, info))


class MainWindow(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(MainWindow, self).__init__()
        self.list_widget = QtGui.QListWidget()
        self.button = QtGui.QPushButton("Start")
        self.button.clicked.connect(self.start_download)
        layout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout()
        layout.addWidget(self.button)
        layout.addWidget(self.list_widget)
        self.setLayout(layout)

    def start_download(self):
        urls = ['http://google.com', 'http://twitter.com', 'http://yandex.ru',
                'http://stackoverflow.com/', 'http://www.youtube.com/']
        self.threads = []
        for url in urls:
            downloader = DownloadThread(url)
            downloader.data_downloaded.connect(self.on_data_ready)
            self.threads.append(downloader)
            downloader.start()

    def on_data_ready(self, data):
        print data
        self.list_widget.addItem(unicode(data))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = MainWindow()
    window.resize(640, 480)
    window.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())