How to move from a QTableWidget to the next widget using the tab-key

Question

I want to know how to move from a table-widget to the next widget when I press the tab key in PyQt.

The current widget sequence is composed of line-edit > combo-box > table-widget > push-button. In the line-edit, when you press the tab key in the beginning, the combo-box > table widget is moved to in sequence. However, in the table-widget, repeatedly moving to the end, it moves to the 0,0 row and column of the table-widget again, not to the next widget (the push-button).

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

There are two main ways to fix this.

The first, and simplest, way is to use setTabKeyNavigation to completely disable moving between cells using the tab-key. The arrow keys must then be used to navigate between cells in the table.

The second way is to modify the keypress event handing for the table, so that Tab in the last cell and Shift Tab in the first cell moves the focus to the next/previous widget.

The demo script below demonstrates both these approaches:

import sys
from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtWidgets

class Window(QtWidgets.QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Window, self).__init__()
        self.edit = QtWidgets.QLineEdit()
        self.combo = QtWidgets.QComboBox()
        self.table = QtWidgets.QTableWidget(3, 3)
        self.button = QtWidgets.QPushButton('Disable Table Tabbing', self)
        self.button.clicked.connect(self.handleButton)
        layout = QtWidgets.QGridLayout(self)
        layout.addWidget(self.edit, 0, 0)
        layout.addWidget(self.combo, 0, 1)
        layout.addWidget(self.table, 1, 0, 1, 2)
        layout.addWidget(self.button, 2, 0, 1, 2)
        self.table.installEventFilter(self)
        self.edit.setFocus()

    def handleButton(self):
        if self.table.tabKeyNavigation():
            self.button.setText('Enable Table Tabbing')
            self.table.setTabKeyNavigation(False)
        else:
            self.button.setText('Disable Table Tabbing')
            self.table.setTabKeyNavigation(True)

    def eventFilter(self, source, event):
        if (event.type() == QtCore.QEvent.KeyPress and
            source is self.table and source.isEnabled() and
            source.tabKeyNavigation()):
            index = self.table.currentIndex()
            if event.key() == QtCore.Qt.Key_Backtab:
                if index.row() == index.column() == 0:
                    QtWidgets.QAbstractScrollArea.focusNextPrevChild(
                        self.table, False)
                    return True
            elif event.key() == QtCore.Qt.Key_Tab:
                model = self.table.model()
                if (index.row() == model.rowCount() - 1 and
                    index.column() == model.columnCount() - 1):
                    QtWidgets.QAbstractScrollArea.focusNextPrevChild(
                        self.table, True)
                    return True
        return super(Window, self).eventFilter(source, event)

if __name__ == '__main__':

    app = QtWidgets.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = Window()
    window.setGeometry(600, 100, 400, 250)
    window.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())