Qt Creator, VSCode or CLion?
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I assumed this question would have been asked many times before. But I can not find any thread about this!
I want to start a large project (one man show). I want to start with an IDE and stick with it. I do not want to learn one and then an other again.
I have some experience with QT Creator and VSCode, but that was long ago.What do you users use and why. What are your experiences. When choosing again, what would it be?
Note that Qt just released live QML view for VSCode. Does this make the choice easier?
Features that I find important:
- good help system (need to learn a lot)
- code completion
- AI assistance (especially for learning)
- QML support
- CMake based (but I guess they are all)
- Github support
- fast compilation (in case project gets very large)
Any advice is very welcome!
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Hi,
Compilation speed and IDE are unrelated so you can cross that part off.
If you want a cross-platform IDE that is optimized for Qt development, then go with Qt Creator. It has all the stuff you need. For the documentation, you have the Qt documentation already at hand. There is AI support as well. So give it a go.
As for cmake, what do you mean by "cmake based" ?
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Hi,
Compilation speed and IDE are unrelated so you can cross that part off.
If you want a cross-platform IDE that is optimized for Qt development, then go with Qt Creator. It has all the stuff you need. For the documentation, you have the Qt documentation already at hand. There is AI support as well. So give it a go.
As for cmake, what do you mean by "cmake based" ?
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Well, I am old enough that I am using Qt Creator because it was the only good cross platform IDE (VS Code didn't exist, yet).
I still very much like the simplicity of Qt Creator. Since modern Qt projects are always CMake-based those projects can be used with any IDE. This also means that the IDE has nothing to do with finding other libraries as this is fully in the domain of CMake. The same is true for compilation times as CMake (hopefully through ninja) is compiling your project, the choice of IDE does not matter.
Qt Creator certainly has the best integration of the Qt documentation as you can easily switch there and search.
Your operating system should also play a part in choosing an IDE. I tend to still use Qt Creator on Windows. However, the debugger is really slow on Windows. Our projects are still qmake-based and so I generate a VS project and open that one with Visual Studio (not Code!). This should be doable with a CMake project directly, but in our experience it is quite slow to switch between release and debug. Otherwise VS is also a solid choice.
As I am still using QtWidgets I also still need the Qt Designer. This is yet another point for Qt Creator as it is directly integrated.
Every IDE will provide basic code completion. From my experience (not a Qt project, though) CLion has a much more advanced code completion as it will (mostly correctly) predict the next line of code if you are writing some boilerplate.
I am not sure how much AI will help with learning Qt inside an IDE. Especially, as it might mix Qt 4, 5, and 6. But, you'll certainly get AI coding integration with any IDE.
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I have long been a loyal user of Qt Creator. However, over the past two years, with the development of AI and AI Agents, VS Code has proven to be far more suitable for vibe coding. Meanwhile, using AI features in Qt Creator requires a commercial license. Admittedly, VS Code falls short of Qt Creator in several aspects, such as viewing help documentation, designing UI interfaces, creating and connecting signals and slots, and refactoring functions. Even so, I have had to get used to working with Qt in VS Code, as its built-in AI helps me get my work done more efficiently.
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I have long been a loyal user of Qt Creator. However, over the past two years, with the development of AI and AI Agents, VS Code has proven to be far more suitable for vibe coding. Meanwhile, using AI features in Qt Creator requires a commercial license. Admittedly, VS Code falls short of Qt Creator in several aspects, such as viewing help documentation, designing UI interfaces, creating and connecting signals and slots, and refactoring functions. Even so, I have had to get used to working with Qt in VS Code, as its built-in AI helps me get my work done more efficiently.
@chenwj said in Qt Creator, VSCode or CLion?:
Meanwhile, using AI features in Qt Creator requires a commercial license.
With Qt Creator 20 you can use the ACP Client to connect to an ACP Agent like Claude Agent, Codex CLI, or OpenCode and do any AI work.
The ACP Client plugin is part of the OpenSource Qt Creator.
