Hiding Qt widget and keeping widget space

qt layout widget
humberto picture humberto · Dec 9, 2009 · Viewed 18.3k times · Source

In a simple form I made a few buttons and put a horizontal layout. When mouse leaves the area one of the buttons, the last one, should be hidden. Using button->hide() it works, but all the buttons are rearranged by the layout manager. What I want is that all other buttons remain in their positions. I tried replacing the widget with a widget placeholder and swapping the button and placeholder hide()/show(), calling placeholder->resize(button->size()), but the layout manager doesn't respect the resize, and the placeholder is set with its minimum size. What is the best way to remove a widget and keep its space?

Answer

Thorbjørn Martsum picture Thorbjørn Martsum · Mar 5, 2016

In Qt 5.2 it is possible to do the following:

QSizePolicy sp_retain = widget->sizePolicy();
sp_retain.setRetainSizeWhenHidden(true);
widget->setSizePolicy(sp_retain);

I earlier posted the same solution here:

How to make a Qt widget invisible without changing the position of the other Qt widgets?

(which seems to be a duplicate of this question).

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