Technique for creating a main window that can be programatically resized and animated

[MarekR22]

From your description it looks like that you messed up something in your code, most of this things should work out of the box.
For animation you have QPropertyAnimation.

[Berryblue031]

I am using QPropertyAnimation.

It is not out of the box, top level widgets in Qt do not automatically re-size to fit their contents

I am programmatically resizing the top level widget when the child widget that contains the toolbar and results pane shows and hides the results pane. There is also a notification area which when it shows notifications expands the top level widget and when the notifications are hidden and the top level widget is resized back to its original size the, When this happens the searchwidget updates itself to take over the space of the notification widget but does not take into account the now smaller size of the top level widget.

My structure is like this

topFramelessWidget
- NotificationWidget
- SearchWidget
------- ToolbarWidget
------- ResultsPaneWidget

I am not sure maybe the things i do in my refresh function are necessary on windows everything appears smoothly but on mac its like you can see when it repaints it shows blank and then draws the content it looks really awful when it blinks like that