If I do that the frame still has the upper border and it doesn't look like it's "integrated" with the tab bar. See the picture above and think about having a frame instead of the list widget and moving it up - it doesn't look good.

I tried to find a solution by looking at QTabWidget source code but it uses quite complicated QStyle and other things for the internal widget stack drawing. I can't follow it.

My original problem was that I want to use a tab bar for a frame which includes many elements but only one element is really unique for each tab. The other elements remain the same so I don't want to create deep copies of them for each page. The easiest solution was to use a widget stack and tab bar. The tab bar changes the page of the stack, the other elements just remain there.

Other solution was to use the QTabWidget, but it can't have many pages pointing to one widget. I'm I doomed to creating several widgets which have identical items?