QDockWidget improvements in Qt 5.6

Images (or in this case, animations) are worth a 1000 words:

Re-order the tabbed QDockWidgets:

This change applies to all the application using QDockWidget without any modification of their code.

New QMainwindow mode to drag tab by group

This is not by default because it changes the behaviour, so application developer may want to enable QMainWindow::GroupedDragging in their code:

MyMainWindow::MyMainWindow(/*...*/) : QMainWindow(/*...*/)
{
    /*...*/
    setDockOptions(dockOptions() | QMainWindow::GroupedDragging);
}

Without this flag, the user can only drag the QDockWidget's one by one. In this new mode, the user is able to drag the whole group of tabbed QDockWidget together by dragging the title. Individual QDockWidget can still be dragged by dragging the tab out of its tab bar.

This animation shows the example in qtbase/examples/widgets/mainwindows/mainwindow:

This changes the behaviour slightly as the QDockWidget may be reparented to an internal floating tab window. So if your application assumed that QDockWidget's parent was always the main window, it needs to be changed.

Programatically resize your dock widgets

If you want to give a default layout that looks nice for your application using many QDockWidget, you can use QMainWindow::resizeDocks to achieve that goal.

Conclusion

You can try these changes in the Qt 5.6 beta

We made those changes because it was requested by one of our customers. You can hire Woboq to fix your own Qt bugs or implement new features inside Qt. Send us an email with the bug number or a description of your feature, and we will reply with a quote.

QtWidgets still have their place on desktop and many applications are still using QDockWidgets.