dockingpanes VS Qt-Advanced-Docking-System

The ribbon bar works better for me in this application because it puts the necessary controls a couple of clicks away.g windows which allow users to position and size them how they want. I've actually written a docking windows library for Qt which I open-sourced (https://github.com/KestrelRadarSensors/dockingpanes) and for that type of user-interface you really need enough tool window (requirements) to make use of, otherwise, it just looks odd.

https://github.com/fizzyade/pingnoo https://github.com/fizzyade/dmgee https://github.com/KestrelRadarSensors/dockingpanes

Personally, I'm partial to the PyO3+PyQt/PySide option because Qt's QWidget APIs are a very polished and mature way to build a portable "as native as feasible without writing a separate frontend for each platform" GUI with great quality-of-life things like QMainWindow::saveState, PyQt-compatible bindings for addons like Qt Advanced Docking System, and tooling like MyPy. (It also helps that, as a KDE user, QWidget is the platform's native UI API.)

Clone it into a subdirectory and then add it via add_subdirectory(Qt-Advanced-Docking-System). Then add it to your app via target_link_libraries(MyAppName PRIVATE qtadvanceddocking) as seen in https://github.com/githubuser0xFFFF/Qt-Advanced-Docking-System/blob/master/examples/simple/CMakeLists.txt.