QTabWidget - Hiding the bar

It has been a while since my last post. I've been sick, my son has been sick and so has my girlfriend. Now I'm back and have been coding on a private project for a couple of days.

While I was toying and trying some ideas I found out how to create tab bars with Qt that are only visible if you have more than one tab. This is quite popular in browser for example. So without further ado, here's the code:

from PyQt4 import QtGui

class TabWidget(QtGui.QTabWidget):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super (TabWidget, self).__init__(parent)
        self.setTabsClosable(True)
        self.tabCloseRequested.connect(self.removeTab)

    def tabInserted(self, index):
        self.tabBar().setVisible(self.count() > 1)

    def tabRemoved(self, index):
        self.tabBar().setVisible(self.count() > 1)

As you can see, it isn't rocket science. I did some googling but couldn't find anything about it, that's why I want to share my findings. The magic is to only hide the TabBar associated with the TabWidget, not the TabWidget itself.

You can use the following snippet to see the TabWidget in action:

import sys
from PyQt4 import QtGui

class TabWidget(QtGui.QTabWidget):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super (TabWidget, self).__init__(parent)
        self.setTabsClosable(True)
        self.tabCloseRequested.connect(self.removeTab)

    def tabInserted(self, index):
        self.tabBar().setVisible(self.count() > 1)

    def tabRemoved(self, index):
        self.tabBar().setVisible(self.count() > 1)

qApp = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)

tab = TabWidget()

button = QtGui.QPushButton('Hello')
@button.clicked.connect
def clicked():
    tab.addTab(QtGui.QLabel('Hello'), 'Hello')

tab.addTab(button, 'Button')

layout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout()
layout.addWidget(tab)

window = QtGui.QWidget()
window.setLayout(layout)
window.resize(600, 400)
window.show()

qApp.exec_()