Migration from Netbeans to Qt Creator

[paulf]

For a long time I used Netbeans cnd for my C and C++ development IDE. Since cnd has been in the long grass for several years now there have been no updates for it (like C++17 and clang tools) and the old Oracle version won't even start with the latest JDK.

So at the end of 2019 I started looking at moving to Qt Creator.

There are a few things that I miss from Netbeans though.

• Tighter SCM integration. In Qt Creator, this seems to be just tacked on to a menu. In Netbeans I can immediately see which files and lines have been modified.
• Project creation works much better for existing projects. I can so something like "make clean ; make all > make.log" and then create a project and tell netbeans to parse make.log to get all of the source files and per-file compiler options. Our build system uses separate SCM abd build directories, but there are symlinks left right and centre. If I do "Import Existing Project" and just accept all of the directories I can end up with up to 10 duplicates of some directories due to the symlinks.
• Macro expansion view (Eclipse also has a similar feature). I didn't use it often, but when I needed it it's much nicer than having to run 'gcc -E' on the command line and then try to find the part I'm looking for.

Any comments or suggestions that would improve my experience?

[JKSH]

@paulf said in Migration from Netbeans to Qt Creator:

For SCM, shortcuts will make things quicker, but I find it all very static and more or less just displaying what I'd see from a shell. With netbeans

• In the editor panel I can see which lines have been added, deleted and changed and can easily undo.
• I can edit within diffs
• I can double click modified files in the status panel to open them

Those do sound like very useful features. I'm not aware of anything similar in Qt Creator at the moment; please post a feature request at https://bugreports.qt.io

I hadn't seen the F2 expansion. It's not too bad, though multiline macros seem to have extra blank lines. Really big macros (and in our old code we have some that expand to several pages of text) won't work so well in a tooltip. But I think that this is good enough, and has the advantage of being dynamic and not requiring a panel.

Looking back, my previous post should've said "click on the macro and press F2".

To see the tooltip, you just need to hover your cursor -- no keypress required. Click + F2 takes you to the macro definition, which might work better for your really big macros.

[JKSH]

@paulf said in Migration from Netbeans to Qt Creator:

• Tighter SCM integration. In Qt Creator, this seems to be just tacked on to a menu. In Netbeans I can immediately see which files and lines have been modified.

Keyboard shortcuts might make things better.

(On Windows) Open a file that has been modified and try pressing Alt+G, Alt+D. Then, press Ctrl+W when done.

Other shortcuts are displayed in Tools -> Git -> Current File and similar.

• Macro expansion view (Eclipse also has a similar feature). I didn't use it often, but when I needed it it's much nicer than having to run 'gcc -E' on the command line and then try to find the part I'm looking for.

Try hovering your mouse cursor over the macro and pressing F2. See if you like that workflow.

It also works on function definitions.

[paulf]

For SCM, shortcuts will make things quicker, but I find it all very static and more or less just displaying what I'd see from a shell. With netbeans

• In the editor panel I can see which lines have been added, deleted and changed and can easily undo.
• I can edit within diffs
• I can double click modified files in the status panel to open them

I hadn't seen the F2 expansion. It's not too bad, though multiline macros seem to have extra blank lines. Really big macros (and in our old code we have some that expand to several pages of text) won't work so well in a tooltip. But I think that this is good enough, and has the advantage of being dynamic and not requiring a panel.

[JKSH]

@paulf said in Migration from Netbeans to Qt Creator:

For SCM, shortcuts will make things quicker, but I find it all very static and more or less just displaying what I'd see from a shell. With netbeans

• In the editor panel I can see which lines have been added, deleted and changed and can easily undo.
• I can edit within diffs
• I can double click modified files in the status panel to open them

Those do sound like very useful features. I'm not aware of anything similar in Qt Creator at the moment; please post a feature request at https://bugreports.qt.io

I hadn't seen the F2 expansion. It's not too bad, though multiline macros seem to have extra blank lines. Really big macros (and in our old code we have some that expand to several pages of text) won't work so well in a tooltip. But I think that this is good enough, and has the advantage of being dynamic and not requiring a panel.

Looking back, my previous post should've said "click on the macro and press F2".

To see the tooltip, you just need to hover your cursor -- no keypress required. Click + F2 takes you to the macro definition, which might work better for your really big macros.

[paulf]

@JKSH
I will log a feature request.

[JKSH]

@paulf said in Migration from Netbeans to Qt Creator:

I will log a feature request.

Great, thanks! When you do, please post a link to the request here, so that others who are interested in the feature can follow it or vote for it.

[paulf]

@JKSH

Here is the link

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTCREATORBUG-23771

[edit aha_1980: simplified link]