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 * 
   

2. Next, we create the text edit widget with a default message:

           te = QTextEdit("<b>Project notes:</b>") 
   

3. Now, we create the dock widget with a title:

           dw = QDockWidget("QGIS...