QTabControl

Everybody knows what a TabControl looks like and what it does. You have a set of predefined tabs and when you click a tab the corresponding page is activated. This all works fine. But when you want to display a tab with a non-default shape, you fall into the deep and you have to paint everything yourself.

Nowadays there are a lot of different tabshapes. And the big vendors keep inventing them while we speak. As soon as a new tab comes out (for example when Microsoft OneNote™ was released) all the TabControl vendors start expanding their TabControl with the new released tabshape.

It is possible to design completely custom tabs, dock them on several positions and use different resizing behaviours.

QShape Designer

To help you to stay ahead of the curve we developed the QShape Designer.

The control has the following features:

QShape Designer
With QShape Designer you can easily design vector based tabs in your own style. You can define lines and roundings (beziers). With help of anchors you specify how the shape must behave when it gets scaled or resized. In QTabControl you can specify how a tab must be shaped for several states. It is even possible to create a different shape for every tab. You can show tabs on the top, left, bottom and right at the same time. You can show the tabs horizontal, vertical or both.

Sizing behaviour
You can choose what should happen when the size changes of the QTabControl. You can choose to let the buttons scroll, stack, or shrink when they don’t fit. You can also use the available width and let the buttons grow in size.
Custom painting
All painters are public, so you can override them and allow custom painting.
Drag and drop
The QTabControl has drag and drop capability that enable you to drag QTabButtons on another position, another QTabStrip or even another QTabControl.
Highly customizable
The QTabControl is highly customizable, you can modify the paddings, margins and colors of the QTabControl, its tabbuttons, tabstrips, navigation area and more.