Dock widgets without close button

🚀 Feature

It would be cool to have dock widgets which don’t have a close-button.

Motivation

I’m having issues with workflows in napari where the user closed dock widgets after configuring them. If the user would only hide the dock widget, everything would be cool.

Pitch

The Dockwidget class used in napari has a constructor parameter close_btn which would allow to have dock widgets without a close button (see)

However, this parameters is not available when calling viewer.window.add_dock_widget(...). It would be practical if the parameter was also available in the API (e.g. here).

Alternatives

At the moment, I’m doing it like this (see):

dw = viewer.window.add_dock_widget(...)
dw._close_btn = False

And it works fine. It would be cool though if this was possible without accessing private class members.

Additional context

Btw. I tried to hide the close button by changing the features of the DockWidget as described in the QT documentation. This didn’t work, as napapri is using a custom header with custom buttons. It might make sense to mention in the documentation (e.g. of setFeatures) that the functionality described here doesn’t work in napari: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qdockwidget.html#DockWidgetFeature-enum

[psobolewskiPhD]

Maybe I wasn’t clear, i like hiding! Open, manipulate, hide to get more viewer space, restore … (restore works for plugins, but not widgets in my experience) I just think I should have the option to close, to kill a widget/plugin… I guess in your case there’s an extra issue beyond the UI/UX aspect (close vs hide)…

[MosGeo]

Here is another case where closing messes up things:

1. Add dock_widget using dock_widget = viewer.window.add_dock_widget(module_widget, name="My Widget", menu=viewer.window.window_menu)
2. Run napari. Widget is visible and its menu action is there in the window menu.
3. Close widget.
4. Menu action is gone 😔

This is expected as close removes the widget completely from memory. It is just not something that I want from a design perspective.

solution as stated in the forum.image.sc: use dock_widget._close_btn=False