Qt: Should I use Visual Studio, Qt Creator or something else?

visual-studio qt ide qt-creator
Rasmus Faber picture Rasmus Faber · Oct 5, 2009 · Viewed 25.4k times · Source

I realize that there have been similar questions, but they seem to have been from when Qt Creator was still in beta, so the answer might have changed since then:

We are going to start a project with a small amount of GUI that needs to work on Windows, OS X and Linux. So choosing Qt was a no-brainer, even though we have little experience with Qt.

What is currently the best option for IDE?

All the developers will be using Windows machines, so the IDE does not need to be cross-platform.

We use Visual Studio for most things, but most of us are also comfortable with Eclipse.

How are the refactoring tools in Qt Creator? I like Visual Assist X when using Visual Studio for C++. Have anyone tried using that with Qt-projects?

I realize that was a lot of different questions. Please answer even if you can't answer all of them.

EDIT:

I should probable add that we already have Visual Studio and Visual Assist licenses, so the cost of those is not an issue.

Answer

rpg picture rpg · Oct 5, 2009

I use Visual C++ 2008 with Visual Assist and Qt Creator with MinGW:

  • MinGW will drive you nuts, but thankfully you can use the VC++ compiler in Qt Creator.
  • The debugger integration is not as good as VC++. You can't set the next instruction or do any of the fancy stuff like see what a function has returned in the locals window. GDB is as slow as a snail.
  • Code navigation is as good as VA X (but use the tech preview, 1.2.1 is not that great)
  • Code completion is acceptable, certainly not as good as VA X. Code completion doesn't work for anything a bit more complicated such as accessing the members of a const_iterator from a QList typedef.
  • Lighter IDE than VC++ and has a nicer GUI IMO.
  • .pro files are generally easier to manage than sln

QtCreator is a good alternative to VC++ and I would definitely use it on Linux. If you already have VC++ 2005 or 2008 and VA X, I recommend that you install the Qt addin and use VC++ for development. I also recommend that you install the Qt SDK side by side and compile in both MinGW and VC++ to catch cross-platforms issues early! Try to keep the .pro files in sync to the sln and beware of this issue.

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