The Qt Company has announced the publication of Qt Creator 6, the new major version of its official IDE to work with the well-known framework, which is also the base technology used by projects like KDE and LXQt.
The first thing that stands out about Qt Creator 6 is that it is based on Qt 6.2, the latest LTS version of the technology that at the time was a great advance towards parity with version 5.15, since version 6, at least until that moment, did not have all the ported features.
Of the new features incorporated into the new version of the IDE, we find that those responsible have moved the start-up of external processes tools such as compilation and clang-tidy. “This avoids problems in Linux, where branching a process from a large application is more expensive than from a small server process “.
Continuing with more things brought by Qt Creator 6, we have the multi-cursor support in editing, a C ++ code model updated to LLVM 13, full support but not enabled by default editing of C ++ with Clangd and now the Built-in Qt Quick Designer is disabled by default, which means that the IDE will open the ‘.ui.qml’ files in Qt Design Studio to offer, according to the company, a more integrated workflow. Another important support aspect is the universal binaries for macOS, which span the ARM and Intel architectures.
Installing Qt Creator 6 RC through the Qt Open Source installer
For project management, the option “Show in the file system view” has been added in the contextual menu, global searches of “Files in all project directories” in the advanced search, the removal of special header nodes in CMake projects and the improvement in the way CMake handles the mentioned header files in target sources, adding to the advancement in support for compiling and running Docker containers (this experimental support is now also made available to Windows users ).
All the details of Qt Creator 6 are available through the official announcement and the change list. The IDE can be used for free, in its Open Source variant, through the corresponding installer to get Qt dev stack (where it is still in RC), while the source code is posted in the section of offline downloads from the official website of the framework.
At this point, it is not necessary to remember the gradual return to darkness that technology began to travel in 2020. For now it seems that the waters have not reached the river, mainly with regard to the relationship with KDE, but I already know They are seeing some moves in case The Qt Company decides to shut down its proprietary technology even further.
