I'm kind of lost on how to approach this problem, I'd like to write a GUI ideally using Tkinter with python, but I initially started with Qt and found that the problem extends either with all GUI frameworks or my limited understanding.
The data in this case is coming from a named pipe, and I'd like to display whatever comes through the pipe into a textbox. I've tried having one thread listen on the pipe and another create the GUI, but in both cases one thread always seems to hang or the GUI never gets created. 
Any suggestions?
In the past when I've had GUI's reading data off of external things (eg: ethernet sockets), I've had a separate thread that handles servicing the external thing, and a timed callback (generally set to something like half a second) to update the GUI widget that displays the external data.
Showing data in a GUI where the data comes from an outside source