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

Answer 1

Hit CTRL+K in QtCreator.

Answer 2

I've never used the Qt visual studio integration, and I've only taken a quick look at qt creator, but here are my thoughts anyway.

Using Qt creator gives you a familiar debugging enviroment across platforms, with support for stuff like Qt collections.

It seems like Qt creator has really good code navigation features. It also integrates with git, subversion and perforce. When starting a new project, that seems like a plus compared to VS.

Answer 3

I would recommend to at least try QtCreator. Obviously for someone used to Visual Studio the transition won't be overnight but in the end I believe it'll be worth it.

Main reason is although you mention all developers will be using Windows, eventually you will have to run the program on other platforms during testing. And then it's hard to imagine you won't need to debug and fix things. You can do just fine with gdb/vim but for someone who's used to a debugger/editor experience that Visual Studio delivers, getting used to gdb/vim can take some time. QtCreator isn't perfect in this area, but it's as close as it gets to Visual Studio.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• It doesn't have the maturity of Visual Studio but for an IDE that's been around for around a year it's great.
• In terms of refactoring, it is not as advanced as Visual Assist X. As far as code browsing I'd say they're equal.

Answer 4

QtCreator is stable enough and a comfortable IDE, although compile/debug cycles are slower on Windows than with Visual Studio. It doesn't have all the fancy features Visual Studio offers, but after using it for a while I just realized I wasn't missing them. Especially in C++, where Visual Studio doesn't provide source refactoring - they really are pushing C# aren't they? ;)

Visual Studio is certainly a nice IDE, but at the end of the day if you have to pay many licences just for the fancy features (depending on the size of your team), that money could be better spent on other tools.

You will also avoid the trouble of maintaining different project files (Visual Studio on Windows, something else on MacOS and Linux), even if you develop on Windows only, time will come when you will have to compile, test and debug minor issues on the other OS'es.

Eclipse is an alternative, but I haven't checked the stability of Designer on that IDE. You might spend some time on configuring each workstation, and you might have to wait for updates. On the other hand, you benefit from the whole Eclipse environment, which could help if you have other needs. But is that worth the risk?

I would definitely try QtCreator first and try to stick with their environment. If that proves to be a problem, it won't be too late to move to VS later.

Your timing isn't too bad either: you should probably test the 4.6 preview, normally the official release should be soon.

Answer 5

qtcreator with ccache and make -j 5 make compile time cut down to almost unnoticeable.

Answer 6

Have you considered a third option, MonoDevelop?

I have found it to be fairly quick, it has rudimentary refactoring support and it plays nice with QT.

Kindness,

Dan