Qt Creator 6 Open-Source IDE Officially Released, This Is What’s New

Qt Creator 6

The Qt Company officially announced today the release and general availability of Qt Creator 6 as the latest and greatest version of this open-source, free and cross-platform integrated development environment for creating Qt apps.

Based on the Qt 6.2 LTS series of the popular widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces for cross-platform apps, Qt Creator 6 is here a little over three months after Qt Creator 5 with various new features and many improvements for Qt application developers.

Highlights of Qt Creator 6 include separate launching of external processes, such as the build tools, clang-tidy and other tools, to avoids issues on Linux, support for general multi-cursor editing and support for importing and exporting font settings in the text editor, C++ code model based on LLVM 13, as well as full support for editing C++ with Clangd.

There’s also support for highlighting color option for namespaces for C++, along with an option to to save opened files automatically after refactoring, simplified wizards for QML, as well as an option to cancel file renaming and to close all projects except one in the Projects’ view context menu.

It also adds an option to Show HEAD when amending a commit for Git, adds an option to run tests without deployment for test integration, adds an options page for CTest, adds initial support for MCU SDK 2.0, and adds support for Apple M1 machines.

Another interesting change in this release is the fact that the integrated Qt Quick Designer is now disabled by default as a first step in providing application developers with an integrated workflow between Qt Design Studio and Qt Creator. As such, Qt Creator will now open .ui.qml files in Qt Design Studio.

“This is a step towards a more integrated workflow between Qt Design Studio and Qt Creator,” said David Schulz. “Qt Quick Designer is still there, you can manually enable it again by checking the QmlDesigner plugin in Help > About Plugins.”

Among other noteworthy changes, Qt Creator 6 adds a “Show in File System View” option to the Projects tree’s context menu, adds a global search function for “Files in All Project Directories” to the Advanced Find scope, and improves support for building and running in Docker containers by accepting remote file paths in more places within the app.

Other than that, Qt Creator 6 removes the special Headers nodes from CMake projects and improves the way CMake support handles header files mentioned in target sources. The devs recommend adding headers to target sources to help Qt Creator and other tools “do the right thing.”

More details about the changes included in this release can be found in the full changelog. In the meantime, you can download Qt Creator 6 from the official website (direct download) as a .run binary (needs to be made executable) that you can easily install on your GNU/Linux distribution with a few mouse clicks.

Last updated 2 years ago

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