You can (must? can’t remember) set the geometry of the editor manually, so there’s nothing to stop you from overlaying it just over the actual text. (which is what I did in Krita)

createEditor probably overrides the whole cell, which given that I only have one cell per row, that wouldn’t work out well. But maybe I’m wrong.

Also, “Somehow overlay a text edit line just over the text that the user is editing. No idea if this is possible.”, is the bit which confused me. Isn’t that exactly what createEditor() does?

Ivan Čukić – thanks! I’m going to watch that after writing this comment. I didn’t realize they had all those presentations online, thats awesome.

Andreas – well I could just brute force with a timer connected to a repaint operation and actually get animations right now. I just assume it’d be slow since I can only paint the whole delegate at a time (like QGraphicsScene has a signal where it tells what needs to be repainted I think, but this information would just be discarded unless I’m missing something.). But thanks for your comment, it has me thinking about a few things…

Tony – yea, I’m looking for someone perhaps with experience doing something like this. It sounds like a fine idea in theory.

As somebody who has taken the widgets-in-view way once, I can tell you what you have to do for that – you just put your widgets into the viewport() of the QListView and you have to handle all geometry changes yourself, probably in QItemDelegate::paint(). You could probably find a way to kill invisible widgets, but I suspect it would still be slow.

Or use the “Overlay editor widget” approach (it’s quite a standard way to use editor widgets!) and use a pixie-dust delegate to implement little icons in the view and limited animations like the “currently playing” animation in Amarok 1.4. You can get your instructions where and how to apply the pixie dust from the model using custom roles, to keep up the model-view-delegate pattern
Oh, you need to find a way to periodically repaint (for animation) – maybe using a clever hack with a frame timer in the model? You can probably send repaint events only where animations are going on, by setting a new value for something (e.g. tint color – a custom role) in the animating row.

QGraphicsView also looks good, although I have no idea how easy it is to implement arbitrary user interaction there.

I’d favor the pixie-dust delegate way of doing things although it’s somewhat limited. So what, it’s a play*list* you are implementing and not a game
*Do* have a good look at QGraphicsView either and ask some people who know more about it.

This is how I expect the “virtual” mode of the Win32 listbox works ( check out LVS_OWNERDATA here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms670558.aspx )