Displays multiple lines of editable formatted text. More.
Properties
Signals
Methods
Detailed Description
The TextEdit item displays a block of editable, formatted text.
It can display both plain and rich text. For example:
Setting focus to true enables the TextEdit item to receive keyboard focus.
Note that the TextEdit does not implement scrolling, following the cursor, or other behaviors specific to a look-and-feel. For example, to add flickable scrolling that follows the cursor:
A particular look-and-feel might use smooth scrolling (eg. using SmoothedAnimation), might have a visible scrollbar, or a scrollbar that fades in to show location, etc.
Clipboard support is provided by the cut(), copy(), and paste() functions, and the selection can be handled in a traditional «mouse» mechanism by setting selectByMouse, or handled completely from QML by manipulating selectionStart and selectionEnd, or using selectAll() or selectWord().
You can translate between cursor positions (characters from the start of the document) and pixel points using positionAt() and positionToRectangle().
Property Documentation
These properties hold the padding around the content. This space is reserved in addition to the contentWidth and contentHeight.
This QML property was introduced in Qt 5.6.
Sets the horizontal and vertical alignment of the text within the TextEdit item’s width and height. By default, the text alignment follows the natural alignment of the text, for example text that is read from left to right will be aligned to the left.
Valid values for horizontalAlignment are:
Valid values for verticalAlignment are:
Whether the TextEdit should gain active focus on a mouse press. By default this is set to true.
This property specifies a base URL which is used to resolve relative URLs within the text.
The default value is the url of the QML file instantiating the TextEdit item.
Returns true if the TextEdit is writable and the content of the clipboard is suitable for pasting into the TextEdit.
Returns true if the TextEdit is writable and there are undone operations that can be redone.
Returns true if the TextEdit is writable and there are previous operations that can be undone.
Returns the height of the text, including the height past the height that is covered if the text does not fit within the set height.
Returns the width of the text, including the width past the width which is covered due to insufficient wrapping if wrapMode is set.
The delegate for the cursor in the TextEdit.
If you set a cursorDelegate for a TextEdit, this delegate will be used for drawing the cursor instead of the standard cursor. An instance of the delegate will be created and managed by the text edit when a cursor is needed, and the x and y properties of delegate instance will be set so as to be one pixel before the top left of the current character.
Note that the root item of the delegate component must be a QQuickItem or QQuickItem derived item.
The position of the cursor in the TextEdit.
The rectangle where the standard text cursor is rendered within the text edit. Read-only.
The position and height of a custom cursorDelegate are updated to follow the cursorRectangle automatically when it changes. The width of the delegate is unaffected by changes in the cursor rectangle.
If true the text edit shows a cursor.
This property is set and unset when the text edit gets active focus, but it can also be set directly (useful, for example, if a KeyProxy might forward keys to it).
Sets whether the font weight is bold.
Sets the capitalization for the text.
Sets the family name of the font.
The family name is case insensitive and may optionally include a foundry name, e.g. «Helvetica [Cronyx]». If the family is available from more than one foundry and the foundry isn’t specified, an arbitrary foundry is chosen. If the family isn’t available a family will be set using the font matching algorithm.
Sets the preferred hinting on the text. This is a hint to the underlying text rendering system to use a certain level of hinting, and has varying support across platforms. See the table in the documentation for QFont::HintingPreference for more details.
Note: This property only has an effect when used together with render type TextEdit.NativeRendering.
This property was introduced in Qt 5.8.
Sets whether the font has an italic style.
Enables or disables the kerning OpenType feature when shaping the text. Disabling this may improve performance when creating or changing the text, at the expense of some cosmetic features. The default value is true.
This property was introduced in Qt 5.10.
Sets the letter spacing for the font.
Letter spacing changes the default spacing between individual letters in the font. A positive value increases the letter spacing by the corresponding pixels; a negative value decreases the spacing.
Sets the font size in pixels.
Using this function makes the font device dependent. Use TextEdit::font.pointSize to set the size of the font in a device independent manner.
Sets the font size in points. The point size must be greater than zero.
Sometimes, a font will apply complex rules to a set of characters in order to display them correctly. In some writing systems, such as Brahmic scripts, this is required in order for the text to be legible, but in e.g. Latin script, it is merely a cosmetic feature. Setting the preferShaping property to false will disable all such features when they are not required, which will improve performance in most cases.
The default value is true.
This property was introduced in Qt 5.10.
Sets whether the font has a strikeout style.
Sets the style name of the font.
The style name is case insensitive. If set, the font will be matched against style name instead of the font properties font.weight, font.bold and font.italic.
This property was introduced in Qt 5.6.
Sets whether the text is underlined.
Sets the font’s weight.
The weight can be one of:
Sets the word spacing for the font.
Word spacing changes the default spacing between individual words. A positive value increases the word spacing by a corresponding amount of pixels, while a negative value decreases the inter-word spacing accordingly.
This property contains the link string when the user hovers a link embedded in the text. The link must be in rich text or HTML format and the link string provides access to the particular link.
This property was introduced in Qt 5.2.
This property holds whether the TextEdit has partial text input from an input method.
While it is composing an input method may rely on mouse or key events from the TextEdit to edit or commit the partial text. This property can be used to determine when to disable events handlers that may interfere with the correct operation of an input method.
Provides hints to the input method about the expected content of the text edit and how it should operate.
The value is a bit-wise combination of flags or Qt.ImhNone if no hints are set.
Flags that alter behaviour are:
Flags that restrict input (exclusive flags) are:
Returns the total number of plain text characters in the TextEdit item.
As this number doesn’t include any formatting markup it may not be the same as the length of the string returned by the text property.
This property can be faster than querying the length the text property as it doesn’t require any copying or conversion of the TextEdit’s internal string data.
QTextEdit is an advanced WYSIWYG viewer/editor supporting rich text formatting using HTML-style tags, or Markdown format. It is optimized to handle large documents and to respond quickly to user input.
QTextEdit works on paragraphs and characters. A paragraph is a formatted string which is word-wrapped to fit into the width of the widget. By default when reading plain text, one newline signifies a paragraph. A document consists of zero or more paragraphs. The words in the paragraph are aligned in accordance with the paragraph’s alignment. Paragraphs are separated by hard line breaks. Each character within a paragraph has its own attributes, for example, font and color.
QTextEdit can display images, lists and tables. If the text is too large to view within the text edit’s viewport, scroll bars will appear. The text edit can load both plain text and rich text files. Rich text can be described using a subset of HTML 4 markup; refer to the Supported HTML Subset page for more information.
If you just need to display a small piece of rich text use QLabel.
The rich text support in Qt is designed to provide a fast, portable and efficient way to add reasonable online help facilities to applications, and to provide a basis for rich text editors. If you find the HTML support insufficient for your needs you may consider the use of Qt WebKit, which provides a full-featured web browser widget.
The shape of the mouse cursor on a QTextEdit is Qt::IBeamCursor by default. It can be changed through the viewport()’s cursor property.
Using QTextEdit as a Display Widget
QTextEdit can display a large HTML subset, including tables and images.
The text can be set or replaced using setHtml() which deletes any existing text and replaces it with the text passed in the setHtml() call. If you call setHtml() with legacy HTML, and then call toHtml(), the text that is returned may have different markup, but will render the same. The entire text can be deleted with clear().
Text can also be set or replaced using setMarkdown(), and the same caveats apply: if you then call toMarkdown(), the text that is returned may be different, but the meaning is preserved as much as possible. Markdown with some embedded HTML can be parsed, with the same limitations that setHtml() has; but toMarkdown() only writes «pure» Markdown, without any embedded HTML.
Text itself can be inserted using the QTextCursor class or using the convenience functions insertHtml(), insertPlainText(), append() or paste(). QTextCursor is also able to insert complex objects like tables or lists into the document, and it deals with creating selections and applying changes to selected text.
By default the text edit wraps words at whitespace to fit within the text edit widget. The setLineWrapMode() function is used to specify the kind of line wrap you want, or NoWrap if you don’t want any wrapping. Call setLineWrapMode() to set a fixed pixel width FixedPixelWidth, or character column (e.g. 80 column) FixedColumnWidth with the pixels or columns specified with setLineWrapColumnOrWidth(). If you use word wrap to the widget’s width WidgetWidth, you can specify whether to break on whitespace or anywhere with setWordWrapMode().
The find() function can be used to find and select a given string within the text.
If you want to limit the total number of paragraphs in a QTextEdit, as for example it is often useful in a log viewer, then you can use QTextDocument’s maximumBlockCount property for that.
Read-only Key Bindings
When QTextEdit is used read-only the key bindings are limited to navigation, and text may only be selected with the mouse:
Keypresses
Action
Up
Moves one line up.
Down
Moves one line down.
Left
Moves one character to the left.
Right
Moves one character to the right.
PageUp
Moves one (viewport) page up.
PageDown
Moves one (viewport) page down.
Home
Moves to the beginning of the text.
End
Moves to the end of the text.
Alt+Wheel
Scrolls the page horizontally (the Wheel is the mouse wheel).
Ctrl+Wheel
Zooms the text.
Ctrl+A
Selects all text.
The text edit may be able to provide some meta-information. For example, the documentTitle() function will return the text from within HTML tags.
Note: Zooming into HTML documents only works if the font-size is not set to a fixed size.
Using QTextEdit as an Editor
All the information about using QTextEdit as a display widget also applies here.
Selection of text is handled by the QTextCursor class, which provides functionality for creating selections, retrieving the text contents or deleting selections. You can retrieve the object that corresponds with the user-visible cursor using the textCursor() method. If you want to set a selection in QTextEdit just create one on a QTextCursor object and then make that cursor the visible cursor using setTextCursor(). The selection can be copied to the clipboard with copy(), or cut to the clipboard with cut(). The entire text can be selected using selectAll().
When the cursor is moved and the underlying formatting attributes change, the currentCharFormatChanged() signal is emitted to reflect the new attributes at the new cursor position.
The textChanged() signal is emitted whenever the text changes (as a result of setText() or through the editor itself).
QTextEdit holds a QTextDocument object which can be retrieved using the document() method. You can also set your own document object using setDocument().
QTextDocument provides an isModified() function which will return true if the text has been modified since it was either loaded or since the last call to setModified with false as argument. In addition it provides methods for undo and redo.
Drag and Drop
QTextEdit also supports custom drag and drop behavior. By default, QTextEdit will insert plain text, HTML and rich text when the user drops data of these MIME types onto a document. Reimplement canInsertFromMimeData() and insertFromMimeData() to add support for additional MIME types.
For example, to allow the user to drag and drop an image onto a QTextEdit, you could the implement these functions in the following way:
We add support for image MIME types by returning true. For all other MIME types, we use the default implementation.
We unpack the image from the QVariant held by the MIME source and insert it into the document as a resource.
Editing Key Bindings
The list of key bindings which are implemented for editing:
Keypresses
Action
Backspace
Deletes the character to the left of the cursor.
Delete
Deletes the character to the right of the cursor.
Ctrl+C
Copy the selected text to the clipboard.
Ctrl+Insert
Copy the selected text to the clipboard.
Ctrl+K
Deletes to the end of the line.
Ctrl+V
Pastes the clipboard text into text edit.
Shift+Insert
Pastes the clipboard text into text edit.
Ctrl+X
Deletes the selected text and copies it to the clipboard.
Shift+Delete
Deletes the selected text and copies it to the clipboard.
Ctrl+Z
Undoes the last operation.
Ctrl+Y
Redoes the last operation.
Left
Moves the cursor one character to the left.
Ctrl+Left
Moves the cursor one word to the left.
Right
Moves the cursor one character to the right.
Ctrl+Right
Moves the cursor one word to the right.
Up
Moves the cursor one line up.
Down
Moves the cursor one line down.
PageUp
Moves the cursor one page up.
PageDown
Moves the cursor one page down.
Home
Moves the cursor to the beginning of the line.
Ctrl+Home
Moves the cursor to the beginning of the text.
End
Moves the cursor to the end of the line.
Ctrl+End
Moves the cursor to the end of the text.
Alt+Wheel
Scrolls the page horizontally (the Wheel is the mouse wheel).
To select (mark) text hold down the Shift key whilst pressing one of the movement keystrokes, for example, Shift+Right will select the character to the right, and Shift+Ctrl+Right will select the word to the right, etc.
Automatically create bullet lists (e.g. when the user enters an asterisk (‘*’) in the left most column, or presses Enter in an existing list item.
QTextEdit::AutoAll
0xffffffff
Apply all automatic formatting. Currently only automatic bullet lists are supported.
enum QTextEdit:: LineWrapMode
Constant
Value
QTextEdit::NoWrap
0
QTextEdit::WidgetWidth
1
QTextEdit::FixedPixelWidth
2
QTextEdit::FixedColumnWidth
3
Property Documentation
acceptRichText : bool
This property holds whether the text edit accepts rich text insertions by the user
When this propery is set to false text edit will accept only plain text input from the user. For example through clipboard or drag and drop.
This property’s default is true.
autoFormatting : AutoFormatting
This property holds the enabled set of auto formatting features
The value can be any combination of the values in the AutoFormattingFlag enum. The default is AutoNone. Choose AutoAll to enable all automatic formatting.
Currently, the only automatic formatting feature provided is AutoBulletList; future versions of Qt may offer more.
This property specifies the width of the cursor in pixels. The default value is 1.
document : QTextDocument *
This property holds the underlying document of the text editor.
Note: The editor does not take ownership of the document unless it is the document’s parent object. The parent object of the provided document remains the owner of the object. If the previously assigned document is a child of the editor then it will be deleted.
QTextDocument *
document () const
void
setDocument (QTextDocument *document)
documentTitle : QString
This property holds the title of the document parsed from the text.
By default, for a newly-created, empty document, this property contains an empty string.
QString
documentTitle () const
void
setDocumentTitle (const QString &title)
html : QString
This property provides an HTML interface to the text of the text edit.
toHtml() returns the text of the text edit as html.
setHtml() changes the text of the text edit. Any previous text is removed and the undo/redo history is cleared. The input text is interpreted as rich text in html format. currentCharFormat() is also reset, unless textCursor() is already at the beginning of the document.
Note: It is the responsibility of the caller to make sure that the text is correctly decoded when a QString containing HTML is created and passed to setHtml().
By default, for a newly-created, empty document, this property contains text to describe an HTML 4.0 document with no body text.
lineWrapColumnOrWidth : int
This property holds the position (in pixels or columns depending on the wrap mode) where text will be wrapped
If the wrap mode is FixedPixelWidth, the value is the number of pixels from the left edge of the text edit at which text should be wrapped. If the wrap mode is FixedColumnWidth, the value is the column number (in character columns) from the left edge of the text edit at which text should be wrapped.
By default, this property contains a value of 0.
int
lineWrapColumnOrWidth () const
void
setLineWrapColumnOrWidth (int w)
lineWrapMode : LineWrapMode
This property holds the line wrap mode
The default mode is WidgetWidth which causes words to be wrapped at the right edge of the text edit. Wrapping occurs at whitespace, keeping whole words intact. If you want wrapping to occur within words use setWordWrapMode(). If you set a wrap mode of FixedPixelWidth or FixedColumnWidth you should also call setLineWrapColumnOrWidth() with the width you want.
QTextEdit::LineWrapMode
lineWrapMode () const
void
setLineWrapMode (QTextEdit::LineWrapMode mode)
[since 5.14] markdown : QString
This property provides a Markdown interface to the text of the text edit.
toMarkdown() returns the text of the text edit as «pure» Markdown, without any embedded HTML formatting. Some features that QTextDocument supports (such as the use of specific colors and named fonts) cannot be expressed in «pure» Markdown, and they will be omitted.
setMarkdown() changes the text of the text edit. Any previous text is removed and the undo/redo history is cleared. The input text is interpreted as rich text in Markdown format.
Parsing of HTML included in the markdown string is handled in the same way as in setHtml; however, Markdown formatting inside HTML blocks is not supported.
Some features of the parser can be enabled or disabled via the features argument:
Constant
Description
MarkdownNoHTML
Any HTML tags in the Markdown text will be discarded
MarkdownDialectCommonMark
The parser supports only the features standardized by CommonMark
MarkdownDialectGitHub
The parser supports the GitHub dialect
This property was introduced in Qt 5.14.
QString
toMarkdown (QTextDocument::MarkdownFeatures features = QTextDocument::MarkdownDialectGitHub) const
void
setMarkdown (const QString &markdown)
overwriteMode : bool
This property holds whether text entered by the user will overwrite existing text
As with many text editors, the text editor widget can be configured to insert or overwrite existing text with new text entered by the user.
By default, this property is false (new text does not overwrite existing text).
[since 5.2] placeholderText : QString
This property holds the editor placeholder text
Setting this property makes the editor display a grayed-out placeholder text as long as the document() is empty.
By default, this property contains an empty string.
This property holds the text editor’s contents as plain text.
Previous contents are removed and undo/redo history is reset when the property is set. currentCharFormat() is also reset, unless textCursor() is already at the beginning of the document.
If the text edit has another content type, it will not be replaced by plain text if you call toPlainText(). The only exception to this is the non-break space, nbsp;, that will be converted into standard space.
By default, for an editor with no contents, this property contains an empty string.
readOnly : bool
This property holds whether the text edit is read-only
In a read-only text edit the user can only navigate through the text and select text; modifying the text is not possible.
This property’s default is false.
tabChangesFocus : bool
This property holds whether Tab changes focus or is accepted as input
In some occasions text edits should not allow the user to input tabulators or change indentation using the Tab key, as this breaks the focus chain. The default is false.
[since 5.10] tabStopDistance : qreal
This property holds the tab stop distance in pixels
By default, this property contains a value of 80 pixels.
Do not set a value less than the horizontalAdvance() of the QChar::VisualTabCharacter character, otherwise the tab-character will be drawn incompletely.
This property was introduced in Qt 5.10.
textInteractionFlags : Qt::TextInteractionFlags
Specifies how the widget should interact with user input.
The default value depends on whether the QTextEdit is read-only or editable, and whether it is a QTextBrowser or not.
Appends a new paragraph with text to the end of the text edit.
Note: The new paragraph appended will have the same character format and block format as the current paragraph, determined by the position of the cursor.
This signal is emitted when text is selected or de-selected in the text edit.
When text is selected this signal will be emitted with yes set to true. If no text has been selected or if the selected text is de-selected this signal is emitted with yes set to false.
If yes is true then copy() can be used to copy the selection to the clipboard. If yes is false then copy() does nothing.
Convenience slot that inserts text which is assumed to be of html formatting at the current cursor position.
It is equivalent to:
Note: When using this function with a style sheet, the style sheet will only apply to the current block in the document. In order to apply a style sheet throughout a document, use QTextDocument::setDefaultStyleSheet() instead.
Convenience slot that inserts text at the current cursor position.
It is equivalent to
[slot] void QTextEdit:: paste ()
Pastes the text from the clipboard into the text edit at the current cursor position.
If there is no text in the clipboard nothing happens.
To change the behavior of this function, i.e. to modify what QTextEdit can paste and how it is being pasted, reimplement the virtual canInsertFromMimeData() and insertFromMimeData() functions.
[slot] void QTextEdit:: redo ()
Redoes the last operation.
If there is no operation to redo, i.e. there is no redo step in the undo/redo history, nothing happens.
Scrolls the text edit so that the anchor with the given name is visible; does nothing if the name is empty, or is already visible, or isn’t found.
[slot] void QTextEdit:: selectAll ()
[signal] void QTextEdit:: selectionChanged ()
This signal is emitted whenever the selection changes.
[slot] void QTextEdit:: setAlignment ( Qt::Alignment a)
Sets the alignment of the current paragraph to a. Valid alignments are Qt::AlignLeft, Qt::AlignRight, Qt::AlignJustify and Qt::AlignCenter (which centers horizontally).
This signal is emitted whenever undo operations become available (available is true) or unavailable (available is false).
[slot] void QTextEdit:: zoomIn ( int range = 1)
Zooms in on the text by making the base font size range points larger and recalculating all font sizes to be the new size. This does not change the size of any images.
[slot] void QTextEdit:: zoomOut ( int range = 1)
Zooms out on the text by making the base font size range points smaller and recalculating all font sizes to be the new size. This does not change the size of any images.
This function returns true if the contents of the MIME data object, specified by source, can be decoded and inserted into the document. It is called for example when during a drag operation the mouse enters this widget and it is necessary to determine whether it is possible to accept the drag and drop operation.
Reimplement this function to enable drag and drop support for additional MIME types.
bool QTextEdit:: canPaste () const
Returns whether text can be pasted from the clipboard into the textedit.
Shows the standard context menu created with createStandardContextMenu().
If you do not want the text edit to have a context menu, you can set its contextMenuPolicy to Qt::NoContextMenu. If you want to customize the context menu, reimplement this function. If you want to extend the standard context menu, reimplement this function, call createStandardContextMenu() and extend the menu returned.
Information about the event is passed in the event object.
This function returns a new MIME data object to represent the contents of the text edit’s current selection. It is called when the selection needs to be encapsulated into a new QMimeData object; for example, when a drag and drop operation is started, or when data is copied to the clipboard.
If you reimplement this function, note that the ownership of the returned QMimeData object is passed to the caller. The selection can be retrieved by using the textCursor() function.
QMenu *QTextEdit:: createStandardContextMenu ()
This function creates the standard context menu which is shown when the user clicks on the text edit with the right mouse button. It is called from the default contextMenuEvent() handler. The popup menu’s ownership is transferred to the caller.
We recommend that you use the createStandardContextMenu(QPoint) version instead which will enable the actions that are sensitive to where the user clicked.
This function creates the standard context menu which is shown when the user clicks on the text edit with the right mouse button. It is called from the default contextMenuEvent() handler and it takes the position in document coordinates where the mouse click was. This can enable actions that are sensitive to the position where the user clicked. The popup menu’s ownership is transferred to the caller.
Finds the next occurrence, matching the regular expression, exp, using the given options. The QTextDocument::FindCaseSensitively option is ignored for this overload, use QRegularExpression::CaseInsensitiveOption instead.
This function inserts the contents of the MIME data object, specified by source, into the text edit at the current cursor position. It is called whenever text is inserted as the result of a clipboard paste operation, or when the text edit accepts data from a drag and drop operation.
Reimplement this function to enable drag and drop support for additional MIME types.
Merges the properties specified in modifier into the current character format by calling QTextCursor::mergeCharFormat on the editor’s cursor. If the editor has a selection then the properties of modifier are directly applied to the selection.
Moves the cursor by performing the given operation.
If mode is QTextCursor::KeepAnchor, the cursor selects the text it moves over. This is the same effect that the user achieves when they hold down the Shift key and move the cursor with the cursor keys.
This event handler can be reimplemented in a subclass to receive paint events passed in event. It is usually unnecessary to reimplement this function in a subclass of QTextEdit.
Warning: The underlying text document must not be modified from within a reimplementation of this function.
Convenience function to print the text edit’s document to the given printer. This is equivalent to calling the print method on the document directly except that this function also supports QPrinter::Selection as print range.
Sets the char format that is be used when inserting new text to format by calling QTextCursor::setCharFormat() on the editor’s cursor. If the editor has a selection then the char format is directly applied to the selection.
This function allows temporarily marking certain regions in the document with a given color, specified as selections. This can be useful for example in a programming editor to mark a whole line of text with a given background color to indicate the existence of a breakpoint.
Returns the text background color of the current format.
QColor QTextEdit:: textColor () const
Returns the text color of the current format.
QTextCursor QTextEdit:: textCursor () const
Returns a copy of the QTextCursor that represents the currently visible cursor. Note that changes on the returned cursor do not affect QTextEdit’s cursor; use setTextCursor() to update the visible cursor.