A QWidget like QTextEdit that wraps its height automatically to its contents?

Question

I am creating a form with some QTextEdit widgets.

The default height of the QTextEdit exceeds a single line of text and as the contents' height exceeds the QTextEdit's height, it creates a scroll-bar to scroll the content.

I would like to override this behaviour to create a QTextEdit that would rather wrap its height to its contents. This means that the default height would be one line and that on wrapping or entering a new line, the QTextEdit would increase its height automatically. Whenever the contents height exceeds the QTextEdit's height, the latter should not create a scroll bar but simply increase in height.

How can I go about doing this? Thanks.

Answer 1

This is almost exactly like a question I answer the other day about making a QTextEdit adjust its height in reponse to content changes: PySide Qt: Auto vertical growth for TextEdit Widget

I am answering instead of marking a duplicate as I suspect its possible you want a variation on this. Let me know if you want me to expand this answer:

The other question had multiple parts. Here is the excerpt of the growing height widget:

class Window(QtGui.QDialog):

    def __init__(self):
        super(Window, self).__init__()
        self.resize(600,400)

        self.mainLayout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout(self)
        self.mainLayout.setMargin(10)

        self.scroll = QtGui.QScrollArea()
        self.scroll.setWidgetResizable(True)
        self.scroll.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOn)
        self.mainLayout.addWidget(self.scroll)

        scrollContents = QtGui.QWidget()
        self.scroll.setWidget(scrollContents)

        self.textLayout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout(scrollContents)
        self.textLayout.setMargin(10)

        for _ in xrange(5):
            text = GrowingTextEdit()
            text.setMinimumHeight(50)
            self.textLayout.addWidget(text)


class GrowingTextEdit(QtGui.QTextEdit):

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(GrowingTextEdit, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)  
        self.document().contentsChanged.connect(self.sizeChange)

        self.heightMin = 0
        self.heightMax = 65000

    def sizeChange(self):
        docHeight = self.document().size().height()
        if self.heightMin <= docHeight <= self.heightMax:
            self.setMinimumHeight(docHeight)

Answer 2

the following code sets a QTextEdit widget to the height of the content:

# using QVBoxLayout in this example
grid = QVBoxLayout()
text_edit = QTextEdit('Some content. I make this a little bit longer as I want to see the effect on a widget with more than one line.')

# read-only
text_edit.setReadOnly(True)

# no scroll bars in this example
text_edit.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOff) 
text_edit.setHorizontalScrollBarPolicy(Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOff) 
text_edit.setSizePolicy(QSizePolicy.Fixed, QSizePolicy.Fixed)

# you can set the width to a specific value
# text_edit.setFixedWidth(400)

# this is the trick, we nee to show the widget without making it visible.
# only then the document is created and the size calculated.

# Qt.WA_DontShowOnScreen = 103, PyQt does not have this mapping?!
text_edit.setAttribute(103)
text_edit.show()

# now that we have a document we can use it's size to set the QTextEdit's size
# also we add the margins
text_edit.setFixedHeight(text_edit.document().size().height() + text_edit.contentsMargins().top()*2)

# finally we add the QTextEdit to our layout
grid.addWidget(text_edit)

I hope this helps.