A Shout-Out to QtCreator 2.8.x on Linux

So this is a little post about C/C++ IDE's, which apart from the browser is the key piece of software I live in most of the day. I know a lot of Windows-centric developers who swear by Visual Studio, and up until recently I used to be one of the VS faithful. I'm going to try and sell you on trying something else, especially if you develop on Linux or OSX but it's available for Windows too.

I think I've finally found a reasonable cross platform VS alternative for C/C++ development that doesn't require shelling out hundreds (or thousands) of dollars every time MS tweaks (or totally screws up) the UI or adds some compiler options. I've been using QtCreator full-time now for 6 months and I think it's awesome. I would buy it in a heartbeat, but it's a free download and it's even open source.

A bit of the background behind my need for a VS alternative: For more than a decade I've been using Visual Studio (since VC5 I think), and various other IDE's from Borland/Watcom/MS before that. When I started working on a new Linux OpenGL debugger (about 6 months ago) all the Linux devs around me where using text editors, cgdb, etc. There was no way in hell I was going back to only a text editor (even the goodness that is Sublime) for editing, gdb cmd line for debugging, and another command line for compiling, etc. It's been a long time since my DOS development days and I'm just too old to do that again on the PC. (On embedded platforms I can tolerate crappy or no IDE's, but not on a full-blown modern desktop!) So I began an exhaustive, and somewhat desperate search for a real Linux IDE with a useful debugger that doesn't suck.

I experimented with a bunch of packages (such as CodeBlocks, CodeLite, Eclipse, KDevelop, etc.) and even some stand-alone debuggers (like ddd, cgdb) on some of my open source projects and settled on the amazing QtCreator 2.8.x. It's a full blown C/C++ IDE with surprisingly few rough edges. It's got all the usual stuff you would expect: editor, project manager (with optional support for things like cmake), integrated source control, an Intellisense-equivalent that just works and doesn't randomly slow the IDE to a crawl like in VS, C/C++ refactoring, and nice gdb/lldb frontends that don't require you to know anything about obscure gdb commands. I've been using it to compile with either clang v3.3 (using Mike Sartain's instructions that make it trivial to switch between clang vs. gcc), and with gcc v4.6. The whole product is super polished, and I find myself happier using it than VS and its fleet of unreliable (but pretty much necessary on real projects) 3rd party plugins like Visual Assist, Incredibuild, etc. that make the whole thing a buggy and unstable mess.

QtCreator's name can be misleading. It's not just for Qt stuff, although it's obviously designed to be great for Qt dev/debugging too. I use it to debug command line and OpenGL apps, either starting them from within QtCreator or attaching to the process remotely. It's got built-in support for Mercurial (hg), Git, Perforce, SVN, etc. although I've only used its hg and p4 support.

Visual Studio since 2012 has apparently gone almost completely batshit, so I've been delaying upgrading for as long as possible even before my VS divorce. I was hoping the saner and more tasteful hands at MS would reign in the "modern app" idiocy and fix things, but I've lost hope. Although with Ballmer (who's obviously been completely out of touch) being finally put to pasture maybe they can turn the ship around.

Here are a few more screenshots of QtCreator Linux in action. I'm using KDE Plasma desktop installed under Ubuntu v12.04 x64. (If you've just installed Ubuntu for the first time and have no Linux desktop preferences yet, do yourself a favor and just go reinstall Kubuntu.) If you want to try it out, be sure to download the version from Qt's website (not the Ubuntu software center - it's really outdated the last time I checked). Also check if your distro requires disabling ptrace hardening before you debug anything. Also, I had to change the default terminal used for running/debugging apps to something else, so under Tools->Environment->Terminal: "/usr/bin/xterm -sl 1999999 -fg white -bg black -geometry 200x60 -e"

We've also just added custom debug visualizers for our most important container classes to QtCreator, but I've not had a chance to play with this stuff yet.

Source control configuration:

Debugging:

More debugging: