pygame-menu: a widget toolkit for building pygame interfaces

What pygame-menu is and the problem it solves in pygame

pygame-menu is a Python library for creating menus and GUIs on top of pygame, and the project description is deliberately plain, a menu for pygame, simple and easy to use. The domain is games and interactive tools, and the gap it fills is specific to pygame's programming model.

Pygame gives you a surface and an event loop. It does not give you a button. So a game that needs a start menu, a settings screen with a volume slider, a text field for a player name or a confirmation dialog ends up hand-drawing rectangles, wiring keyboard focus, handling clicks, and re-implementing the same widget three times in three screens. pygame-menu packages those widgets instead.

The widget list in the README is the concrete scope of the project: buttons, color inputs, clock objects, drop selectors, frames, images, labels, selectors, tables, text inputs and color switches, with multiple customization options. The presence of tables and color inputs is what separates it from a menu widget kit aimed at title screens.

The library is version 4.x, with 4.5.4 published on 2025-04-25 and a parallel 4.5.4-ce release the same day, and 4.5.2-ce in March 2025. The repository was last pushed on 2026-10-14 and is not archived. The package requires Python 3.9 or newer and 4.0, and declares support for pygame 1.9.3 and later as well as the 2.0 line, with the classifiers listing Python 3.9 through 3.13.

Two backends: the standard pygame and pygame-ce

The backend question is settled at install time rather than at runtime, and the README is explicit that pygame-menu requires either pygame, which is the default, or pygame-ce. If pygame-menu is installed normally, the standard pygame backend is used.

The reason this matters is the fork history in the Python game ecosystem. pygame-ce, the Community Edition, is a maintained fork that continues the line pygame left off, and a library that supports both can be used in projects that have moved to the fork as well as in projects that have not. The pyproject.toml makes the choice explicit with an extra named ce that pulls in pygame-ce 2.2.0 or newer, and a parallel extra named pygame that requires pygame 2.0.0 or newer. The base dependency set already lists pygame itself, so the default install is never missing a backend.

The runtime dependencies are otherwise minimal, with pyperclip 1.8.0 or newer for clipboard access alongside the pygame requirement. A menu library that pulled in a heavy stack would be an unpleasant dependency for a game, and this one does not.

Installing the package and building the documentation from source

The published package installs with pip, and the -U flag in the README's own command is there to keep an older copy from lingering.

$> pip install pygame-menu -U

Choosing the Community Edition is an extra on the same package name.

$> pip install pygame-menu[ce] -U

Building the documentation from a Git checkout takes a different path, with the docs extra carrying Sphinx and the autodoc type hints and read-the-docs theme, and the source install done in editable mode so the local tree is what gets documented.

$> git clone https://github.com/ppizarror/pygame-menu
$> cd pygame-menu
$> pip install -e ".[docs]"
$> pip install pygame -U   # or pygame-ce if preferred
$> cd docs
$> make html

The repository layout supports that workflow: the package lives in a pygame_menu directory, the documentation sources in docs, the tests in test, and there is a build_package.py script alongside a MANIFEST.in for packaging and a .readthedocs.yml for the hosted build. The project also advertises a Repl.it link, so the library can be opened and run in a browser REPL without a local setup, which is the quickest way to see whether the widget set fits your project before you install anything.

The widget catalogue and how it is customized

The widget list is best read as a coverage map for a game's interface needs. Buttons and labels cover navigation. Text inputs cover name entry and chat-style fields. Color inputs and color switches cover the themeable parts of a settings screen, where a player expects to pick a highlight colour. Selectors and drop selectors cover enumerated choices such as resolution or difficulty. Tables cover inventories, statistics and leaderboards. Frames group widgets into panels, images and clock objects decorate them, and a menu container assembles the whole thing.

The customization options are where the library earns its keep, and the README describes them only in general terms, with multiple customization options for the widgets and extensive customization of the menu itself. There is also a sound topic in the project's keyword list, which points to the audio feedback that menus in games usually need. Documentation is published at pygame-menu.readthedocs.io for the latest version, and the repository carries a Codecov badge plus a CI workflow, so the code is tested and measured on every change.

The design assumption worth noticing is that the menu is drawn on the pygame surface rather than composed from native widgets. That gives you a consistent look across platforms and full control over the rendering, and it means the menu lives in the same coordinate space and event loop as the rest of the game, which is exactly what a pause menu or a settings overlay needs.

Packaging, tooling and the two distribution flavours

The pyproject.toml is worth reading for the operational details. The package exposes a PyInstaller hook directory through the pyinstaller40 entry point, so a frozen build of a game that uses pygame-menu can find its resources, which is the kind of detail that only shows up when a user reports a blank menu in a packaged build. Versioning is dynamic and read from an attribute of the package, so the version lives in one place rather than in two.

The test extra collects nose2 with the coverage plugin, pytest and pytest-cov, so the project runs under either runner, and the linting is modern: ruff is configured with a Python 3.9 target and a line length of 88, and the top-level Makefile exposes three targets. Linting runs ruff check over the tree, formatting runs ruff format, and the fix target does both, applying the automatic corrections first.

One thing to be aware of when choosing a distribution is that two package names exist in the release history. The main project publishes as pygame-menu, and the same version numbers also appear under pygame-menu-ce in the release list, so the maintenance of the two lines is visible in the tags. If you are picking between them, check which one your project's pygame dependency actually is, because the extra you install determines the backend and the two lines do not necessarily move together.

On licensing, the project declares the MIT licence in the pyproject metadata and the README carries an MIT badge, though the repository's own licence metadata is not detected automatically, so read the LICENSE file at the repository root if you need the exact terms.

Where pygame-menu fits and where it does not

The first limitation is that surface-drawn widgets are not native widgets. A text input in pygame-menu handles your game's input model, keyboard focus and selection rules, and it will not behave like a platform text field with IME support, clipboard conventions, accessibility announcements or right-to-left layout. If your interface is heavy on text entry, or if the audience needs assistive technology, a desktop widget toolkit is the better choice, at the cost of leaving the game surface.

The second limitation is that pygame-menu is a menu and GUI library, not a scene or state manager. It does not solve your asset pipeline, your input mapping, your resolution scaling or your save system. It also does not add anything to the rendering of the game itself, so a project that needs a full editor interface inside the game will still have to build most of it.

The realistic alternative is to write the interface directly on the pygame surface, which sounds worse until the interface is small. A start menu with two buttons is genuinely less code to write by hand than to configure, and a hand-rolled version has zero dependencies and no version constraints on pygame. The library earns its cost when the same interface pattern appears on several screens, when widgets need themes and consistent behaviour, or when the alternative is a much heavier GUI toolkit that does not fit inside the game window. That threshold, not the widget count, is the decision.

Editorial conclusion

pygame-menu is the right choice when you are building a pygame game or tool that needs settings dialogs, menus or text entry and you would rather not implement focus handling and widget rendering yourself. It is the wrong choice if your interface needs complex text editing, accessibility or platform-native widgets, because a surface-drawn menu does not provide those. Verify first that your Python version is 3.9 or newer, that you install the pygame-ce extra if you are on the Community Edition, and that the widget set covers what your screens actually need before you commit to the look.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. ppizarror/pygame-menu on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases