Saving The Window State Settings

 Saving the window geometry alone is not sufficient to save the state of the Program View dock widget. The state of the main window also needed to be saved to preserve the settings of the tool bars and dock widgets, including where they are docked or floating (undocked), their sizes, and whether they are turned on or off. This window state was added to the save and restore settings routines of the main window, which were given the settings name windowState.

A dock widget can also be turned off by clicking its close button on its upper-right corner. To turn it back on, there is a context (right-click) menu that can be accessed by clicking on the unused part of the menu bar or tool bar area. A dock widget can be undocked (to make it floating) by dragging the dock widget title bar away from the main windows. Tool bars can also be undocked.

When I discovered this context menu when noticing that there was an empty tool bar beside the main tool bar that should not have been there. Besides the Program View dock widget, this context menu also showed a blank tool bar and toolBar. The blank tool bar was actually the main tool bar and it was blank because the main tool bar was never given a title (the windowTitle property).

These issues were corrected by assigned the main tool the title Main Tool Bar and the extra tool bar was removed (which must have been added by default when the Main Window GUI class was created and a new tool bar was inadvertently created to hold the tool bar actions).

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