Archive for August, 2019


String Selection Widget for Qt5

Aug 26, 2019

Some time back, I developed a data entry application in Qt5. One of the requirements was to let the user select a single string from a predefined list of string. I developed a custom widget called SStringSelector for this purpose. SStringSelector has two views: display and selection. The display view presents the currently selected string (blank if no string is selected), and a push button. To select a string, the user clicks on the button which presents the user with the selection dialog. The selection dialog consists of a list of string in an QListWidget and the user can select one of them by double-clicking a string. If the list of strings are long, the user can filter them using a filter QLineEdit present above the QListWidget.

SStringSelector is distributed as a part of QtUtils repository hosted on Github. The SStringSelector widget is really simple to use. Simple add the SStringSelector.h and SStringSelector.cpp files in your project and add an instance of SStringSelector in the layout of your app.

Below are some screenshots of the widget under Windows:

The SStringSelector Widget.
Selection Dialog of the SStringSelector Widget.
Filtering Strings in the Selection Dialog.

Color Picker Widget for Qt5

Aug 24, 2019

Qt5 support standard dialogs such as QFileDialog, QFontDialog, and QColorDialog, however, it does not provide a color picker to allow a user to pick a color. Recently, I need a color picker for one of my projects and I implemented a simple color picker widget.

SColorPicker is available from Github as a part of QtUtils repository. To use SColorPicker, add the header and cpp files directly in your project. Then, simply add an instance of SColorPicker in a layout. SColorPicker will appear as 16×16 pixels colored square in the layout. If you need a different size, change it in the SColorPicker's constructor. When a user double-clicks on the colored square, the system’s color dialog will appear allowing the user to choose a color. The selected color can be obtained from color() function or by connecting to colorPicked() signal.

Below are the screenshots of the SColorPicker_Demo and system color dialog present to the user on Windows 10 computer.


Fill Disk Partition

Aug 23, 2019

Recently, I had to give away a computer with couple of disks in it. I wanted to securely erase data on these disks as I stored personal sensitive information on them. Using a program such as DBAN was not an option as I was not allowed to remove the operating system from the computer. My goal was to simply overwrite free space from all the partitions. I couldn’t find anything I liked so I ended up writing a simple tool called FillPartition in python.

FillPartition is hosted on Github at https://github.com/saurabhg17/FillPartition. It is really easy to use with just one mandatory argument (the path of the partition) and one optional argument (–outputDir, -od) the directory in the partition where files should be written. FillPartition writes 1GB files filled with 0 bytes until the free space is less than 1GB and then write one final file of the size equal to the remaining free space.

Below is a screenshot of a run of FillPartition on Windows