Question

Using Qt stylesheets, is it possible to set a different background colour for each tab in a QTabBar that has 4 or more tabs?

My Qt application has 6 tabs underneath the menu bar. I’d like to change their background colours to 6 different colours using stylesheets.

2 issues appear to be standing in my way:

• I can only style the “first”, “middle”, and “last” tabs using pure stylesheet syntax (hence why I say “4 or more” tabs).

• I don’t think the individual tabs are child widgets of the QTabBar that I can access. The idea being that I could then attach a property to each child tab that I could reference in the stylesheet.

For example:

// Stylesheet
QTabBar::tab[index="3"] {
   background: blue;
}

// Code
QTabBar* bar = new QTabBar;
int index = bar->addTab("Tab 1");
QWidget* tab1; //= ????
tab1->setProperty("index", index);

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

The individual tabs are structs rather than objects. These structs are then used on painting. See the Qt source for more details.

I’ve had an experiment with this and I can’t find a way to access a direct index, like you indicated. For your reference, I tried using properties such as the text, toolTip, whatsThis but couldn’t access any of them from the stylesheets, unfortunately.

I’m afraid I don’t think what you want to do is possible without subclassing and modifying the paint events yourself.