Is there a way to program without using the Qt Creator?

[nore]

Hi,

I am currently researching into the development of guis and graphics. After some time working with the win32 api I quickly realized I would have to find a simpler way to create guis so that I was not stuck "reinventing the wheel". It is my understanding that these gui tools such as wxWidgets and Qt and even WPF are built up from the tools laid out by MFC in order to allow for easy creation of graphical user interfaces--is this correct?
Now, I see that Qt has its focus on a tool named the Qt Creator, an IDE used for simple and worry-free creation of guis. I am unfamiliar with this approach (I only know of wxSmith and what I assume is WPF in Visual Studio), and prefer to write code within my own IDE to create guis, is this possible by means of some Qt library or api?

Thank you,

-nore

[SGaist]

Hi and welcome to devnet,

Qt is not bound to Qt Creator at all. Qt Creator is a nice and simple cross-platform IDE that allows you to have a consistant development environment accros platform. Qt itself is a C++ framework that is agnostic of the IDE. It provides integration with Visual Studio to help manage the projects aspects but you can use Notepad if you want to write your code.

The one thing that you need is the compiler, either Visual Studio C++ tools or MinGW. The latter you can download from the Qt online installer.

One core thing is to use CMake as project manager. It has integration for a Qt since a pretty long time and has become the official tool to both build Qt itself and user projects although qmake is still supported currently.

[TomZ]

@nore I very often write using a plain text editor and a commandline. No problems there.

The docs on the website seem to be focused in QtCreator when it comes to more complex stuff (like Android integration), but for most cases its fine.

QtCreator is nice, though quite buggy in certain corners. You can try it, or ignore it. No problem.

[Chris Kawa]

@nore said:

It is my understanding that these gui tools such as wxWidgets and Qt and even WPF are built up from the tools laid out by MFC in order to allow for easy creation of graphical user interfaces--is this correct?

No. MFC is Microsoft's older application framework including UI and other utilities. Those other libraries you mentioned are not based on MFC. They are its alternatives. At low level both MFC and Qt use WinAPI i.e. the Windows' system level API, along with GDI for graphics and a bunch of other technologies, like COM, but MFC and Qt are completely separate frameworks. MFC is pretty dated at this point and does not use modern technologies like hardware acceleration through DirectX. WPF is also a bit older technology, based in the .Net framework and mostly used with C# (although it's not limited to it). Modern day Windows UI framework is WinUI3 as part of the Windows App SDK. You can use it with .Net or C++ with the help of C++/WinRT library.
The strength of Qt compared to it is that it is cross platform and often far easier to use. The downside is that you can't access some of the bells and whistles of the latest Windows UI, like the previous Aero, Metro and now Fluent design elements.

and prefer to write code within my own IDE to create guis, is this possible by means of some Qt library or api?

As others mentioned QtCreator is just an IDE. It's well suited for Qt development, but not by any means necessary. Same goes for CMake. It's currently the most supported project generator, but you can use anything. As an example I've worked on a project that used premake/MSBuild with Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code and also on a completely custom solution. It all boils down to the amount of manual setup you need to do to integrate Qt into your project, but it can be used with pretty much anything down to a notepad and command line.

[nore]

@SGaist said in Is there a way to program without using the Qt Creator?:

Hi and welcome to devnet,

Qt is not bound to Qt Creator at all. Qt Creator is a nice and simple cross-platform IDE that allows you to have a consistant development environment accros platform. Qt itself is a C++ framework that is agnostic of the IDE. It provides integration with Visual Studio to help manage the projects aspects but you can use Notepad if you want to write your code.

The one thing that you need is the compiler, either Visual Studio C++ tools or MinGW. The latter you can download from the Qt online installer.

One core thing is to use CMake as project manager. It has integration for a Qt since a pretty long time and has become the official tool to both build Qt itself and user projects although qmake is still supported currently.

@Chris-Kawa said in Is there a way to program without using the Qt Creator?:

@nore said:

It is my understanding that these gui tools such as wxWidgets and Qt and even WPF are built up from the tools laid out by MFC in order to allow for easy creation of graphical user interfaces--is this correct?

No. MFC is Microsoft's older application framework including UI and other utilities. Those other libraries you mentioned are not based on MFC. They are its alternatives. At low level both MFC and Qt use WinAPI i.e. the Windows' system level API, along with GDI for graphics and a bunch of other technologies, like COM, but MFC and Qt are completely separate frameworks. MFC is pretty dated at this point and does not use modern technologies like hardware acceleration through DirectX. WPF is also a bit older technology, based in the .Net framework and mostly used with C# (although it's not limited to it). Modern day Windows UI framework is WinUI as part of the Windows App SDK. You can use it with .Net or C++ with the help of C++/WinRT library.
The strength of Qt compared to it is that it is cross platform and often far easier to use. The downside is that you can't access some of the bells and whistles of the latest Windows UI, like the previous Aero, Metro and now Fluent design elements.

and prefer to write code within my own IDE to create guis, is this possible by means of some Qt library or api?

As others mentioned QtCreator is just an IDE. It's well suited for Qt development, but not by any means necessary. Same goes for CMake. It's currently the most supported project generator, but you can use anything. As an example I've worked on a project that used premake/MSBuild with Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code and also on a completely custom solution. It all boils down to the amount of manual setup you need to do to integrate Qt into your project, but it can be used with pretty much anything down to a notepad and command line.

Awesome, thank you for the information. Chris' layout of the api information really helps. I will look around.