Qt Creator

Posted at 5:44pm on Wednesday April 8th 2009

Reviewed: Linux isn't short of a few integrated development environments, but if your chosen development arena happens to be Qt, and/or KDE, the only viable option for the last eleven years has been KDevelop. KDevelop is a powerful application that supports many more languages than just C++, but the bewildering array of icons, panels, tabs, menus and windows are likely to scare beginners back to Blitz Basic.

There's a new version of KDevelop on the horizon, but Nokia has beaten them to the punch with Qt Creator, which comes included in the latest release of Qt 4.5 - that's the one with the LGPL licence.

Qt Creator: nothing if not pretty.

In the beginning

Qt Creator has been designed to offer the programmer a smooth, integrated and powerful development environment. For the first time with Qt, you can create the GUI, write the code and debug your project from within the same application.

The killer feature is the embedded version of Qt Designer. Its inclusion means you can drag Qt widgets into the blank canvas of your application and switch to the source code immediately. To create a simple web browser, for instance, just drop the WebKit widget into your application, switch to the main window's source file and add the functionality you need.

As you would expect, Qt Creator comes with Qt Designer embedded and ready for action.

You don't have to worry about precompilers or adding the user-interface to the Makefile - Qt Creator does that for you. Just click on the large Play button to compile your code and run the app.

But it's the source code editor where you'll spend most of your time, and Qt Creator offers one of the nicest we've used. It looks and feels very similar to KDE's Kate, and includes syntax highlighting, function and bracket folding and code completion.

Qt Creator's ability to get inside your code and link to documentation is superb.

Instant feedback

While you're typing, any obvious errors are highlighted in exactly the same way that spelling errors are highlighted in OpenOffice.org, and compilation errors switch you to the problematic chunk of code. This all happens instantly, and the whole application is snappy and responsive to use.

The search function has taken a hint from Firefox, helpfully highlighting every occurrence in the document. Unfortunately the Replace field to the right of Search is the closest Qt Creator gets to offering any kind of refactoring - this feature has been promised, but this is one area where the latest KDevelop alphas beat Qt Creator hands down.

There are plenty of small usability features. Hold the cursor over a section of folded code and a pop-up window displays its contents. All the methods in the current file are listed in the location bar above the editor, and you can quickly switch between a methods declaration in the header file and its definition in the .cpp file by pressing Shift+F2. Debugging is equally smooth, and Qt Creator makes better sense of the Qt API than gdb alone.

Set breakpoints then pause execution whenever you need to - Qt Creator brings everything together under one app.

Another aspect to this release that we really like is a side-effect of Qt's cross-platform compatibility. Simply 'make clean' a project, move it to either OS X or Windows, open it in a local Qt Creator and the app will compile. This cross-platform ability brings out the best in Qt, and the best in Qt Creator. It's an IDE that fits Qt development in a way way that only Qt developers could envisage, and we like it.

Verdict: Finally, Qt developers have an IDE that knows how to work with Qt without any further messing about. 9/10

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Your comments

Works great

ean5533 (not verified) - April 8, 2009 @ 6:28pm

I've been using Qt Creator for a while, and every release (~2-4 weeks) is amazingly better. If you ever want to make a Qt program, this is hands down the way to do it.

It does!

murrayy (not verified) - April 8, 2009 @ 11:03pm

Im working with it for some time. Its greate!

Looks like visual basic to

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 3:59am

Looks like visual basic to me :-)

1.0

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 7:32am

Only 1.0 version. I waiting for 2.0 or 3.0

The thing is - I know that

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 11:11am

The thing is - I know that Qt Creator may be perfect for qt and C++, but what about other languages?

I spend most of my time doing work with scripting languages, and a very few time spent on C (and then I use vim because I have setup vim perfectly for C... I would wish other editors would however learn some tidbits of vim features. Not only the keybindings, but the whole insert stuff and re-arranging code parts, really rocks)

Is the name (_Qt_ Creator) a

Lake-end (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 11:41am

Is the name (_Qt_ Creator) a dead give away? I mean it is obviously made with Qt dev. in mind, qt being c++ that's okay also, but I suspect there are better tools for other languages and scripting.

And yea, I've been using it for a while to do my work, it's great!

Penguin

John tee (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 12:01pm

OMGosh that little penguin guy is so cute!

RT
www.anon-tools.cz.tc

Shame its not within the Eclipse framework

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 12:06pm

This is good news but also bad news - it seems shortsighted to develop an entire IDE and not leverage all of the work that has gone into Eclipse and CDT

Maybe in version 2.0..

Looks like their should be a hudzilla tyep tutorial on the way ?

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 12:25pm

Go on ! This looks like the kind of stuff that a nice tuxradar Hudzilla tutorial would be made of ....(or a Linux Format tutorial for that matter !)

Qt for Eclipse

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 12:38pm

How have all of you missed out on the Qt plug-in for Eclipse? It does all the things this author describes, but in Eclipse.

Qt for Eclipse - debug basically broken

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 1:18pm

I've tried the QT for Eclipse, and debugging QT apps is basically broken on Windows. There's a problem with the CDT debugger environment that doesn't work with the mingw gdb (see http://cdtdoug.blogspot.com/2007/04/zero-to-breakpoint-in-10-seconds.html?showComment=1235108520000#c4895117507906399990 for example). I've tried downgrading to gdb 6.6 and still have issues.

Debugging in Qt Creator works fine.

Poor syntax highlight support

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 1:29pm

It can't even highlight Lua, a not all too uncommon language to be using. A friend tried it and apparently it scales to large files quite poorly too.

Remember what does "Deploy everywhere" means - your code will run great, but chances are it'll look crap on other platforms. Including almost half of Linux installs, with gtk integration in 4.5 being buggy.

(*cough* nevermind that different platforms have different interface design guidelines)

Amazing IDE

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 1:43pm

I love Qt Creator and use it almost every day. Highly recommend it!

I think the review was ok,

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 9, 2009 @ 7:33pm

I think the review was ok, but the comment about dissing Blitz Basic is a little arrogant. Blitz Basic supports many advanced functions that you would not normally find in a normal basic programming language.

There have been IDE's for Qt

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 10, 2009 @ 12:13pm

There have been IDE's for Qt around for years.
To name some : Monkeystudio, Eduyck...

They aren't perfect, but at least, they are open source...

Can the windows version build WIN32 C apps?

littlenoodles (not verified) - April 10, 2009 @ 6:41pm

I imagine that the Windows version includes gcc and builds Windows QT binaries. But can you use use it to replace VS6 for building a WIN32 C app?

That would be really nice. Also, it might be the start of a migration path from WIN32 to QT.

I guess that leads to another question. Can QT code somehow coexist in a WIN32 app? If so, that would allow for gradual migration. A migration tutorial would be a great way to get people to take advantage of portable LGPL QT coding. In my case, it's a C app - no MFC stuff - but the answer would be useful either way.

Blitz Basic...

Sslaxx (not verified) - April 12, 2009 @ 10:26am

...so does, for that matter, FreeBASIC. I'd rather use the free BASIC that can do that rather than one that costs over £50.

It works, but somehow it's molasses-slow

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - April 13, 2009 @ 7:06am

Apart from all the praise I have a complaint about Qt creator.

I really don't know how they managed it, but Qt designer is molasses-slow at editing on my machine compared to e.g. MS Visual C++. You compile, click on an error, and count to three or four before the file is opened.

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Awesome

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - May 4, 2009 @ 7:11pm

Awesome...just what I was looking for all along. LOVE IT !!

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Thank god something which is not Eclipse

99999999 (not verified) - November 6, 2009 @ 4:20am

Eclipse is a slow piece of crap, that can barely boot in a nder a minute, and frequently has problems keeping up with my typing. (Yay! Java!) Creator has been nothing but a joy since I started using it.

Eclipse

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - November 25, 2009 @ 10:22pm

"Leverage all the work that has gone into CDT"?
Nice idea, but last time I looked Eclipse was only
able to talk to gdb, not the MS debugger on Windows.
That's a hard sell to someone with a customer base
mainly on Windows, using the Microsoft compiler.
The fact that something uses Java does not make it
cross-platform.

dashesy

dashesy (not verified) - December 22, 2009 @ 11:45pm

yet another IDE!!!
Thanks Nokia for LGPLing QT, but it was more appreciated if it was an add-on for Eclipse, like Google did with Android!