Clickable elements or child widgets inside custom-painted delegate

Question

I have a QListView, where I display items using a custom delegate with custom painting. Within each item (i.e. each list row) I want to be able to show a couple of "hyperlinks" which the user could click on and which would then call on some functions.

I have already tried to check the official documentation (e.g. Model/View Programming) as well as quite a lot of googling, but haven't been able to figure out how to accomplish this.

I have two ideas, each with their own problems:

• I could draw them using child widgets, like a flat QPushButton. How do I then position and display these widgets?
• I could also draw them as text strings. How do I then make them clickable? Or can I capture click events on the parent QListView and somehow determine coordinates from those? I could then match coordinates to these clickable elements and act accordingly.

My initial approach was to use QListWidget with .setItemWidget(), where I had a proper widget with a layout and child widgets. Unfortunately this was too slow when my list grew to hundreds or thousands of items. That's why I changed to QListView with a delegate.