QTabBar with optional button to the right of every tab

**momesana** · 6th October 2007, 21:31

Hi, I want to have an extra button on a QTabBar, like the closeButton in Firefox. My current solution is subclassing from QTabWidget and doing the drawing myself. It works but I'm losing the boons of CSS-Styling

. This way I need to write a new class every time I want to implement a different look. Is there a way to achieve the same effect without losing the Styleability of the widget or is it possible to access the defined stylesheet values without doing all the parsing logic so I can try to take them into consideration when painting the tabbar? ... like getter functions for the properties and also the properties for the subcontrols?

Thanx in advance

**jpn** · 7th October 2007, 12:14

I'm not 100% sure but I think some of those Qt 4 dedicated IDEs out there have such tabs. Of course, it has also been suggested to Trolltech: http://trolltech.com/developer/task-...ntry&id=137891

**wysota** · 7th October 2007, 13:09

To be honest QTabBar/QTabWidget API sucks when it comes to modifying it. If you take a look at the sources, it depends heavily on P-IMPL and QStylePainter. In my opinion these classes need to be redesigned. It might be hard because of a need to maintain backward compatibility, but currently QTabBar is surely one of the hardest widgets to extend, so something should be done about it. The least they could do is to introduce the "icon" property (or taking the icon from the widget associated with the tab) and "iconClicked()" signal. That should be doable without introducing any virtual methods.

**momesana** · 7th October 2007, 14:25

Thanks for replying. I guess then I have to use my own class and sacrifice Stylability until the trolls come up with a better solution (I hope they do, even though it doesn't seem like they care too much from looking at the bug entry).

Thanx.

**wysota** · 7th October 2007, 17:09

It could be because it would be hard to implement on MacOS for instance... MacOS tab bars don't have space for icons and it'd look silly if you just sticked an icon there.

**momesana** · 7th October 2007, 17:22

Originally Posted by wysota

It could be because it would be hard to implement on MacOS for instance... MacOS tab bars don't have space for icons and it'd look silly if you just sticked an icon there.

I've never worked with MacOS so I can't tell but generally having such an optional icon is a good thing, at least when it really is optional. It really improves usability when there are many open tabs like in a browser.

**wysota** · 7th October 2007, 17:38

I know it's a good thing. I've been trying to implement that d**n thing on QTabBar for days... Each time I ended up concluding that currently one needs to implement almost everything from scratch.

**jpn** · 7th October 2007, 19:45

Originally Posted by wysota

Each time I ended up concluding that currently one needs to implement almost everything from scratch.

Same result here...

**wysota** · 7th October 2007, 19:50

Originally Posted by jpn

Same result here...

Maybe we should cooperate? It would only be half a scratch each

**momesana** · 7th October 2007, 23:16

A joint venture between libQxt and wwidgets :-D and I'll be the consumer of the result :-D.

**wysota** · 7th October 2007, 23:25

Honestly I don't think we'd be able to do anything really useful and platform independent without Trolltech changing the API. The widget simply relies too much on p-impl and style code. Without decoupling those there is not much we can do - there is no API to retrieve the icon rect of each tab for instance.