Qt Creator provides you with tools to design and develop user interfaces and complex applications for multiple desktop and mobile platforms.

Designing User Interfaces

Qt Designer is a tool for designing and building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from Qt widgets. You can compose and customize your widgets or dialogs and test them using different styles and resolutions.

Widgets and forms created with Qt Designer are integrated seamlessly with programmed code, using the Qt signals and slots mechanism, that lets you easily assign behavior to graphical elements. All properties set in Qt Designer can be changed dynamically within the code. Furthermore, features like widget promotion and custom plugins allow you to use your own widgets with Qt Designer.

Coding Applications

As an IDE, Qt Creator differs from a text editor in that it knows how to build and run applications. It understands the code as code, not just as plain text. This allows it to:

• Enable you to write well formatted code
• Anticipate what you are going to write and complete the code
• Display inline error and warning messages
• Enable you to semantically navigate to classes, functions, and symbols
• Provide you with context-sensitive help on classes, functions, and symbols
• Rename symbols in an intelligent way, so that other symbols with the same name that belong to other scopes are not renamed
• Show you the locations in code where a function is declared or called

Why Do You Need Projects?

To be able to build and run applications, Qt Creator needs the same information as a compiler would need. This information is specified in the project build and run settings.

Creating a project allows you to:

• Group files together
• Add custom build steps
• Include forms and resource files
• Specify settings for running applications

You can either create a project from scratch or import an existing project. Qt Creator generates all the necessary files, depending on the type of project you create. For example, if you choose to create a graphical user interface (GUI) application, Qt Creator generates an empty .ui file that you can modify with the integrated Qt Designer.