Qt Advanced Docking System lets you create customizable layouts using a full featured window docking system similar to what is found in many popular integrated development environements (IDEs) such as Visual Studio. Everything is implemented with standard Qt functionality without any platform specific code. Basic usage of QWidgets an QLayouts and using basic styles as much as possible.

This work is based on and inspired by the Advanced Docking System for Qt from Manuel Freiholz. I did an almost complete rewrite of his code to improve code quality, readibility and to fix all issues from the issue tracker of his docking system project.

The following video gives a first impression what is possible with the Advanced Docking System for Qt.

There is no central widget like in the Qt docking system. You can dock on every border of the main window or you can dock into each dock area - so you are free to dock almost everywhere.

There is no difference between the main window and a floating window. Docking into floating windows is supported.

When dragging the titlebar of a dock, all the tabs that are tabbed with it are going to be dragged. So you can move complete groups of tabbed widgets into a floating widget or from one dock area to another one.

A perspective defines the set and layout of dock windows in the main window. You can save the current layout of the dockmanager into a named perspective to make your own custom perspective. Later you can simply select a perspective from the perspective list to quickly switch the complete main window layout.

• Windows 10

Open the ads.pro with QtCreator and start the build, that's it. You can run the demo project and test it yourself.

The following example shows the minimum code required to use the advanced Qt docking system.

MainWindow.h

#include <QMainWindow>
#include "DockManager.h"

namespace Ui {
class MainWindow;
}

class MainWindow : public QMainWindow
{
    Q_OBJECT

public:
    explicit MainWindow(QWidget *parent = 0);
    ~MainWindow();

private:
    Ui::MainWindow *ui;
    
    // The main container for docking
    ads::CDockManager* m_DockManager;
};

MainWindow.cpp

#include "MainWindow.h"
#include "ui_MainWindow.h"

#include <QLabel>

MainWindow::MainWindow(QWidget *parent) :
    QMainWindow(parent),
    ui(new Ui::MainWindow)
{
    ui->setupUi(this);

    // Create the dock manager. Because the parent parameter is a QMainWindow
    // the dock manager registers itself as the central widget.
    m_DockManager = new ads::CDockManager(this);

    // Create example content label - this can be any application specific
    // widget
    QLabel* l = new QLabel();
    l->setWordWrap(true);
    l->setAlignment(Qt::AlignTop | Qt::AlignLeft);
    l->setText("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. ");

    // Create a dock widget with the title Label 1 and set the created label
    // as the dock widget content
    ads::CDockWidget* DockWidget = new ads::CDockWidget("Label 1");
    DockWidget->setWidget(l);

    // Add the toggleViewAction of the dock widget to the menu to give
    // the user the possibility to show the dock widget if it has been closed
    ui->menuView->addAction(DockWidget->toggleViewAction());

    // Add the dock widget to the top dock widget area
    m_DockManager->addDockWidget(ads::TopDockWidgetArea, DockWidget);
}

MainWindow::~MainWindow()
{
    delete ui;
}

• Uwe Kindler, Project Maintainer
• Manuel Freiholz

This project uses the LGPLv2.1 license