Brief introduction
I’ve seen several questions in the Qt Forum about how to customize or create our CustomWindow predefined window title buttons or the styles of it. First of all is necessary to explain that this is not a trivial issue since the OS API defines these controls and styles.
In the case of Windows, the title bar is created by Windows Manager so it is impossible to modify it. If we want a personalized title bar or modify the styles of the border of the window or whatever, it is necessary to remove it and then, create our custom QWidget with our own title bar. Before we start to write our own custom QWindow we need to understand that is not an easy task. Our QWidget must fulfill the following requirements:
- Catch some mouse events: press, release, move… In order to know where to move or how to resize the window.
- Implement the top-right buttons behavior: close, minimize, maximize, restore…
- Manage the include of the central widget that will has the main functionality.
- We could want to add a top-left menu and the title of the window. It is necessary to implement too.
- The good things that provide us a custom title bar is the possibility to add new buttons with extended functionality, customize the top-left menu with our own options and definitely, to have our application window style unified.
The best way to learn Qt goes trough code, code & code. In this case, create our custom window title and all the functionality it involves is a good way to learn the Qt window management.