Need Advice: Best IDE for Mac OSX

[JimDaniel]

Hi, I need some advice. I just bought my first Mac computer and want to set up a Qt dev environment on it. What are my best options, your preferences...etc? I know about XCode, but is it the best option for use with Qt?

Thanks, Daniel

[fullmetalcoder]

Did you have a look at the Qt Software section? There are at least three IDEs referenced there. All of them are meant to :

• support Qt 4 development out-of-the-box
• be cross platform (built with Qt 4)

Surely you ought to find something that fits your needs. And if you don't then a simple text editor + a shell can still do wonders.

[JimDaniel]

Thanks for the advice fmc, however I am also looking for opinions, not just options.

[fullmetalcoder]

The best opinion you may get on this topic is ultimately yours and, while it may look awfully hard, testing 3-4 Qt based apps of that size turns out to be quite easy actually : at most it falls down to downloading a couple of relatively small source packages and running qmake && make for each, which won't take more than a couple of minutes for each of them.

By the way, I think this post, being all about opinion/reviews belongs to the general discussion or the Qt Software subsections rather than the Qt Programming.

Last but not least, if you're so interested in opinions I'll give you mine. It will of course be a little biased but I'll try to use some arguments to support it.

• QDevelop : frankly I don't like the UI but it is probably just a matter of taste, not a grave usability failure. The project parser sucks balls but you may not notice it if your projects are very simple (no includes, no variable referencing through $$ no subdirs using project file name instead of dir, ...). Last time I got the (ctags-based) completion to work (a long time ago) it was not very accurate and slow as hell. It does not have designer integration, nor assitant integration
• Monkey Studio : at source level it's an ugly beast (way too fragmented which induces unnecessary complexity and explains the LONG build time). The UI is a bit better IMO. The project parser seems to work well but the project management part is not very intuitive. Debugging just does not work and even running a project sometimes fail (it is impossible to run Edyuk from it for instance). Completion uses QScintilla so it *should* work but is limited and requires manual setup of API files which I never managed to achieve.
• HaiQ : emphasis on power (old school?) users as it treats project files as source code (loads them but does not allow simple manipulation of them through UI). No debugger. ctags-based completion (deps, speed issues, ...)
• Edyuk : allows both approach to project management (standard and HaiQ-like). Has the fastest and most accurate code completion (without any external deps) and automatically generates completion db for Qt on first run. Has Designer and Assistant integration. Uses QCodeEdit so it has by far the best editor (in terms of speed, memory usage, features and flexibility). Extended graphical debugging facilites. Good class browser which also takes UI files into account, is refreshed automatically upon modification. Clean and intuitive interface (again that's my opinion )

Another important note : QDevelop is (almost) dead, at least it looks so.

Hope this helps

[JimDaniel]

You are right of course, but you are forgetting that I'm quite lazy and indecisive. I believe I'll give your IDE a try next. Giving XCode a go at the moment.

And if any mod reads this, this thread may in fact be better off in the software section, as fmc suggests.

[kghose]

Hi,

I've been using eclipse and am very impressed and comfortable with it. It also helps that I can use the same IDE for my Ruby and Python projects too

-kg

[JimDaniel]

Thanks for the response, kghose, I looked into Eclipse, but had some trouble setting Qt up. Glad to know its possible. I'll give it another shot...