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Comment by MrUnderhill | Hacker News Reader

Most people I talk to seem to think QtCreator is only any good if you're developing Qt applications. Not so! It's imho actually a marvellous IDE for any C++ project. The debugger is allright, and the auto complete / code navigation is excellent compared to all other C++ IDEs for Linux I've tried. It's not exactly snappy on my box, but reasonable compared to what else is out there.

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For excellent C++ support in a Linux IDE you should have a look at KDevelop 4.x some time. Qt Creator reuses KDevelop's C++ parser, but doesn't quite go as far on making use of it for semantic functionality as KDevelop does.

For example, it does excellent semantic syntax highlighting where the same variable is drawn in the same color throughout - after using it for a while, code in other editors looks pretty dead :-).

True enough, I'm not sure why I forget KDevelop. Possibly (and yes, my insides ache when I'm being this superficial, but I can't help it) because it looks ghastly.

They're both Qt apps, i.e. they pick up their looks from your active Qt style engine and settings (aside from the fact that Qt Creator foregoes full system integration in favor of using hardcoded backgrounds on some widgets, which tends to be a frequently cited criticism against it actually).

Well the cold hard truth is that Qt Creator looked good on every system i used it in (Windows XP/Seven, Gnome, KDE) while KDevelop looks quite bad/unpolished on its only platform (KDE)

Well, for reference, here's a screenshot of the current KDevelop release on the current KDE release with default settings for each, so people can make up their own minds: http://simplest-image-hosting.net/jpg-0-plasma-desktopud5039

And FWIW, considering that KDE apps do work on and get shipped for Windows and Mac OS X, that "only platform" is a pretty broad one. Actually I can't speak to how complete the port of KDevelop's own application logic to those platforms is as I haven't tried it there, but I certainly happily use apps like Okular and Gwenview on Windows 7. Here are shots of that too, while we're at it: http://simplest-image-hosting.net/png-0-windows and http://simplest-image-hosting.net/png-0-capture24

Here's a shot of Qt Creator for comparison, default settings as well: http://simplest-image-hosting.net/jpg-0-plasma-desktophl5039

That shows some of the issues I have with it - I don't like the custom theming, especially given how inconsistently it's applied (still uses system looks for scrollbars, the menu bar doesn't fit at all, etc.).

Yep, KDevelop is nice too.

I really wish the various teams working on open source IDEs would work together to make one very good IDE with a good plugin infrastructure to support the union of their features, instead of a zillion quite-good-but-not-it ones.

Well I find code completion and code navigation much better in KDevelop 4, it really has some excellent code parsing and insight. So that's what I use as my general C++ IDE. But when some more insight and support for Qt is needed I guess Qt Creator still beats it. Not to mention the new Qt Quick support and nice quick deployment on mobile devices.

Completely agree. I'm using it for Qt dev on the Mac, and it looks and works great,but I'm also using it to develop some generic C++ libraries.

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