Qt Designer Patches

From qtnode

Designer Box Selection Patch

This was a quick and dirty patch against Qt 4's Designer to get back a form of widget selection which was available in Qt 3's Designer. File:DesignerPatch.zip.

Copy the patch to the top level Qt source directory, and type patch -p0 < designer.patch, then recompile Qt. The patch should work against Qt 4.2.2 and up. (It's probably OK with earlier versions too).

As you can see in the image below, you can now box select widgets that are in a container. In Qt 3 you used to be able to box select with the mouse by holding down the control key.

In Qt 4, the control key with a mouse drag clones widgets instead. To avoid conflict with cloning widgets, the keyboard modifiers for box select are Control+Shift (or Alt+Shift on a Mac for consistency with the rest of the Qt 4 designer code). If you don't like it, you can always alter the patch yourself.

Before this patch, the only known workaround was to start the box select from the top-level form and then shift-select the container to remove it from the final set of selected widgets. This is awkward especially when the form already contains numerous widgets.