Amazing to see this still maintained. Qt creator was my go-to IDE about 20 years ago. At this time, Visual Code, Eclipse, NetBeans and friends had been incredibly resource demanding where Qt creator felt pretty lightweight yet powerful.
I'm still using QtCreator as my go-to cross-platform C++ IDE! It might give CLion a shot since there's now a free version, but so far I haven't really felt a need to do so.
I switched to using JetBrains for most things recently, and I'll say this about CLion: it is incredible and my instant go-to for CMake-based projects. For any other build system it is a massive headache to get working in my experience.
Every year I try to use CLion for my project and every year it fails miserably compared to Qt Creator for indexing, navigation, etc. on large-scale codebases. It has more complete refactors though.
When CLion was launched, it only supported CMake. Support for other build tools has been bolted on to that and the seams are sadly very obvious IMO.
Qt Creator is the only IDE I'll use for C++, and I only wish that it had the incredibly in-depth language support for other languages (I'm a D fan and would love an actually good IDE for it).
Qt Creator has always been one of the nicer free C++ IDEs, and qmake one of the nicer build systems. Even if you're not doing Qt development at all.
Qt Creator is reasonably nice. I believe that qmake is deprecated now though in favour of CMake.
I think rather Qbs (the build system that was supposed to replace qmake) was deprecated, in favor of either cmake or qmake (both of which are still actively developed and supported).
Qbs is deprecated. Building with qmake is still supported for end users of the Qt framework. For building Qt itself, since Qt6, the build system was moved to CMake.
Anyone else here old enough to have used the similar UIM/X for Motif ?!
QtCreator was a bit like the lightweight version of KDevelop for me. I didn't really needed any of the Qt features, just the C++ editor. And the C++ support was really good.
For me it had the best debugger integration and visualizers back in mid 2000s. In fact that's how I learned about .gdbinit and macros.
For non Qt projects, but CMake (Conan) based, it is good?
I haven't used it in a few years, but I always found it to be very flexible and useful for non-Qt projects.
I last used it for an embedded project, which are sometimes a pain to set up in an IDE (cross-compiler, sysroot, debug server, etc.), and I was shocked by how easy it was to get going and how smooth it felt compared to most IDEs.
Yes. I use it with wxWidgets and other C++ projects, never touching Qt at all. The performance analysis tools on Linux have been useful to me, and the text editor is lovely to use instead of fuzzy-font-land like Visual Studio Code.
Honestly the name is doing Qt Creator a bit of a disservice, given how fantastic an IDE for any C++ codebase it is, Qt or not.
Yes - it's good for this use case! It even has built-in support for fetching dependencies declared in project conanfiles.
That's how I always used it. CMake and non-Qt. Very solid IDE.