Docking floating wxAUI panes together

[Dan Korn]

Hello,

We're developing a new app with wxAUI.

It gives us the ability to have palettes which are dockable and floatable, which is great.

But we also want to the user to be able to create ad-hoc containers for arbitrary sets of panes, so that they can drag one floating pane onto another and have that turn into a single floating pane with two tabs.  Basically what you can do with floating palettes in Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Visual Studio.

Is this possible to do?

Thanks,

Dan

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Mon, 18 May 2026 13:54:00 -0700 (PDT) Dan Korn wrote:

DK> But we also want to the user to be able to create ad-hoc containers for
DK> arbitrary sets of panes, so that they can drag one floating pane onto
DK> another and have that turn into a single floating pane with two tabs.
DK> Basically what you can do with floating palettes in Adobe InDesign or
DK> Microsoft Visual Studio.
DK>
DK> Is this possible to do?

No. There was an attempt to implement this in a so-called "dynamic AUI"
branch a long time ago but it unfortunately could never be merged. It would
be great to have this feature, of course, but it would require a lot of
work (I think it would be simpler to do it anew than to resurrect that old
branch but whichever way it's done, it still won't be simple) and so far I
haven't had an opportunity to do it and nobody else did it either.

Regards,
VZ

--
TT-Solutions: wxWidgets consultancy and technical support
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[Dan Korn]

Thanks for the quick response.

Do you think for us to do a simple version of this on our own, by intercepting when a pane is dragged onto another pane?  Or am I being naive about the. complexity?

Thanks again,

Dan

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Mon, 18 May 2026 14:18:49 -0700 (PDT) Dan Korn wrote:

DK> Do you think for us to do a simple version of this on our own, by
DK> intercepting when a pane is dragged onto another pane? Or am I being naive
DK> about the. complexity?

AFAIR, the difficult part is allowing any pane to dynamically become a
wxAuiNotebook (and vice versa). But maybe I overestimate the difficulty
just because I got burnt out all these years ago. You can see the last
state of my branch at https://github.com/vadz/wxwidgets/tree/aui-dynamic-notebook
Perhaps it can still be useful.