Question

I have an inactive QMainWindow with a QTabWidget as CentralWidget which holds multiple QPlainTextEdits. Beside that I have a seperate QWidget flagged with Qt::WindowStaysOnTopHint and Qt::Tool which I want to use as a find/replace tool for the QPlainTextEdits.

Now when I use the tool widget the QMainWindow is shown as inactive like it should and the selection background of the selected text in the active QPlainTextEdit is rendered as inactive (slightly grey) but I want the selection to be rendered like the QMainWindow would be active, with the default selection color w/o loosing the focus on the tool widget.

How do I achieve that?

Answer 1

Try something this:

QPalette p = myInactiveWidget->palette();
for (int colorRole=0; colorRole<QPalette::NColorRoles; colorRole++) p.setColor(QPalette::Inactive, colorRole, p.color(QPalette::Active, colorRole));
myInactiveWidget->setPalette(p);

That should make (myInactiveWidget)’s inactive-color-palette the same as its active-color-palette, so that it no longer looks inactive. Or if all you care about is the color of the text-selection-block, then this would probably be sufficient:

QPalette p = myInactiveWidget->palette();
p.setColor(QPalette::Inactive, QPalette::Highlight, p.color(QPalette::Active, QPalette::Highlight));
p.setColor(QPalette::Inactive, QPalette::HighlightedText, p.color(QPalette::Active, QPalette::HighlightedText));
myInactiveWidget->setPalette(p);