Are we talking Qt4 here? First of all you should connect to the QHeaderView::sectionClicked() signal of the header and implement showing the editor there. Moving columns shouldn't interfere with that. You can disable section moving with QHeaderView::setMovable() just to make sure. If you'll still want to move headers, it should be enough to reimplement mouseMoveEvent for the header to call appropriate methods from the header class which handle moving.