Playing with pinned trays, I noticed that it only un-hides the tray when the cursor is on the text of the name of the tray. I’m used to ACAD where you simply need to throw your cursor to the side, and it will un-hide when it lands anywhere on the collapsed tray bar that runs the full height of the screen.
I was able to get around this by naming my left tray ‘Left (a hundred spacebars) Tray’, so that no matter how far up or down my cursor is, the tray unhides.
That’s OK, but if I use the same naming tactic for the right tray, it’ll re-hide it before I have a chance to move to the proper tray items. I think it’s because the space-bars between words don’t quite count as a piece of text, and it decides the cursor isn’t over a viable character when moving a few pixels to the left to get on the tray.
Could we get a code update where the cursor needs to be anywhere on the full-height white-space of the bar, instead of just the text characters?
FYI, each docking area can host multiple tray docking panes, each of which can host a stack of individual trays, each of which may be assigned multiple panels.
SketchUp migrated to using the Qt framework GUI libraries. It looks as though each autohidden (pinned) tray manifests as a margin tab wide enough for the tray caption. They seem to want to appear in the margins near the top.
I’m not sure if “expand to fit” tabs are possible. It sure would reduce the moving of the cursor on my large 28" UHD display.
Let's ask Gemini AI ... (click to expand) ...
The direct answer is yes, the Qt Framework is capable of this, but it requires a custom implementation of the QTabBar or a QProxyStyle. It is not a native “toggle” or property that can be switched on.
In a standard Qt application, the framework allows a developer to override the default tab behavior to achieve the “fill” or “equally partitioned” look you described.
How it is achieved in Qt
To make tabs fill the docking margin ($100%$ height for one, $50%$ for two, etc.), a developer must implement the following:
setExpanding(true): This property must be set on the internal QTabBar. By default, dock tabs have this set to false, which collapses them to the size of the text.
Custom tabSizeHint: The developer must override the function that calculates tab dimensions. Instead of returning the width of the text, the function must query the height of the parent dock area and divide it by the number of active tabs ($H_{tab} = H_{total} / n$).
QProxyStyle Override: The style engine must be told to ignore the standard pixel metrics (which usually cap tab size) and instead use the full available rect of the “AutoHide” area.
Summary of the Logic
Detect the total height of the vertical dock bar.
Count the number of pinned/hidden tabs currently in that specific margin.
Calculate the fraction of the height each tab should occupy.
Redraw the tab background and label to span that calculated area.
While the framework provides the building blocks to do this, it requires the application’s creator to write the specific logic to handle the math and the layout updates.
So it seems like this would be something the SketchUp Development Team would need to do to customize the behavior of pinned tray tabs.
There would be a caveat. I have my autohidden trays on the left side and also have custom toolbars on the left side toolbar dock. Already I often get the OBJECTS (Outliner) tray sliding out when I just want to get to the File menu. It is annoying and the tab is quite small.
If it was half height and my other tray on the left was the other half, I’d have a tray sliding out every time I went over them to get at the tool buttons. (Unless there was an option to move the pinned trays outside the toolbar docks?)