Recently, I’ve been evaluating Qt Creator for general C/C++ development. I’m currently involved in the development of a rather large C++ application that is approaching 200,000 lines of code and 1000 source modules. In the past, I’ve typically used Vim for editing, and Eclipse as a gdb front-end when needed. Qt Creator is a rather new tool developed by Nokia’s Qt team. What initially attracted my attention was that one of the reasons the project was started was no existing tools effectively handled the Qt codebase, which is quite large. Things I like about Qt Creator:
- it works fairly well with any C++ Make based project. This includes projects built with autotools as well as the Qt Qmake build system.
- easy to import existing projects
- it is very fast. Indexing 200,000 lines of code happens in around a minute or so.
- Provides a Vim compatibility mode that actually works
- provides fast methods for finding files, symbols, and seeing where symbols are used
- did I mention yet it is fast?
I also recorded a screencast that demos Qt Creator with a large project (can be viewed in firefox). As always, I’m interested in what others find interesting in this or other tools. Future efforts will be to use Qt Creator to build and remotely debug ARM binaries — I am interested in what others have done in this regard.
If you do try Qt Creator, I recommend the latest pre-release snapshot.