Thank you for the useful comments. At least the fake separator problem has been solved, as disabling the action has exactly the desired effect. It is clear to me that QAction is not a visual element. However, it seems to be an intended way to add them directly to a menu bar and since this is perfectly legitimate, it's such a pity that tool tips and checkable don't work. Nonetheless, for my special case, the simplicity of this solution trumps the overhead of defining explicit buttons and dealing with a layout to add the buttons to, even if I have to go without tool tips and checkables. It just makes me wonder why there are three different concepts that work in different ways (QPushButton, QToolButton, and QAction in QMenuBar or QMenu), where all of them are essentially just clickable buttons that trigger actions. To me as a user of the Qt framework this appears to be a place that could perhaps use a think over.