xibless can be used either from the command line or through Python. To use it from the command line, you type:
xibless compile <source> <dest>
source is the path of the Python module you wrote that describes the UI you want to build. dest is the path you want your resulting Objective-C file to be written at. To use xibless directly from Python, the usage is similar:
import xibless
xibless.generate(source, dest)
These commands will generate code at dest. If dest has an extension other than .h, a .h header will be generated alongside it. If dest doesn’t have an extension, a .m extension is automatically appended.
The command line xibless command also has a run command letting you quicky see what your script looks like as a real UI. If you run:
xibless run <source>
the source script will be compiled and wrapped around a “RunUI” app which will simply display the window.
Now, all this does is that it generates UI code. xibless hasn’t, yet, any integrated solution to let you easily build a XCode-less program. However, what you can do is to look at the demos folder and base yourself on those demos (which are completely XCode-less) to build your own project.
xibless.generate() has a localizationTable argument (--loc-table from the command line). If you set it to a non-empty string, string localization will be enabled, that is, all strings will be wrapper around NSLocalizedStringFromTable(theString, localizationTable, @""). This enables you to have localized UIs. See an example of such UI in the localized demo.
If there are some strings that you don’t want to see wrapped in a localization call, use NLSTR("mystring") (NLSTR is for Non-Localizable STRing).
When calling generate() from Python, you can pass arbitrary arguments through args. What you pass will be available as the args global value in the script. For example, if you generate a UI with:
xibless.generate(source, dest, args={'foo': 'bar'})
You can do stuff like this in your script:
myLabel = Label(window, text=args['foo'])
If not specified, args in the script will be an empty dictionary.