Creating a dock widget

All the panels in QGIS are dock widgets. These widgets can attach to a side of the main window or float freely in a separate window. These panels can contain any other type of widget, which is why they are usually the interface for QGIS plugins. In this recipe, we'll create a dock widget with a text editor widget inside.

Getting ready

Open the QGIS Python console by selecting the Plugins menu and then clicking on Python Console.

How to do it...

We'll create a QTextEdit widget. Then we'll create a QDockWidget and place the QTextEdit widget inside it. Finally we'll display the dock widget in the main window:

  1. First, we import the Qt libraries, which contain all the widgets:
            from PyQt4.QtCore import * 
        from PyQt4.QtGui import *

Get QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial