Do you use the designer, or do you code your gui manually?

[Brandybuck]

I use the Designer. I avoided it in Qt3, but changed my mind in Qt4. The Qt3 Designer created widgets, which meant I was always subclassing an autogenerated class. But with the new UI form classes this is not a problem. I can treat the UI as a true object, and use it the way I want to use it. I typically use the UI as a private data member, but sometimes use multiple inheritance instead. The second problem with Qt3 was that it generated "messy" code (imho). But Qt4 Designer generates very clean sensible code.

I did have one GUI a couple of months ago that was too complicated for Designer. I needed to use a couple of custom layout managers in it, and some "hand tweaking", to make lay it out correctly. But that's the exception.

I don't put everything in a single UI file, though. I tend to split it up. The main window, menus and toolbars will be one UI file, and the central widget antoher UI file. If I have a tabbed widget, then every page will be a separate UI file. Etc.

Designer has proven to be a huge timesaver.

[BrainB0ne]

I always use the designer to design my GUI's, but only the layout.... for functionality i use the subclassing method with Visual Studio 6 as IDE.

[rexi]

I mostly used the designer with KDevelop3. I'm still not exactly sure what is the right way to use it (or, the preferred way) I've been creating Qt apps with KDevelop, as well as with Eclipse. As I understand it, the first encourages subclassing, the latter encourages using the UI as a member. Now I'd like to know what most of the users of Qt prefer....

[lenardpi]

I use the designer for simple dialogs only.

The feature I would really need is being able to put a _subclassed_ widget onto the form. If there is already such a functionality, I don't know how to use it... What I can do is to use the Qt provided widgets only, but usually I'd like to work with eg. MyTabWidget instead of QTabWidget. I'd welcome Visual Studio's convenient solution in the designer for this issue.

[jpn]

The feature I would really need is being able to put a _subclassed_ widget onto the form. If there is already such a functionality, I don't know how to use it... What I can do is to use the Qt provided widgets only, but usually I'd like to work with eg. MyTabWidget instead of QTabWidget.

Yes, it's possible. See Promoting Widgets for more details.