Qt Quick Tools and Utilities

Qt offers several tools and utilities to enable a rich developer experience, especially for Qt Quick developers. The following sections provide a brief introduction to those tools and utilities, and provide links to further information about them.

Qt Creator

The Qt Creator IDE is the key tool that enhances the overall developer experience of working with Qt and Qt Quick. Its editing, formatting, profiling and debugging features for Qt Quick make working with Qt Quick easier.

Qt Design Studio

Qt Design Studio enables designing Qt Quick-based UIs using simple drag-n-drop gestures that most designers are familiar with. It offers UI elements from the Qt Quick and Qt Quick Controls modules, as well as integration for custom UI elements.

Qt Quick Effect Maker

Qt Quick Effect Maker is a tool for creating shader effects for Qt Quick with high productivity and performance. You can run Qt Quick Effect Maker as a standalone tool but it is also included in Qt Design Studio.

QML Debugger

The QML Debugger is a very useful utility that enables:

• debugging JavaScript functions,
• executing JavaScript expressions,
• and inspecting QML properties.

The QML debugger is part of both Qt Creator and Qt Design Studio.

QML Profiler

The QML Profiler enables you to get necessary diagnostic information, allowing you to analyze the application code for performance issues. For example, too much JavaScript in each frame, long-running C++ functions, and so on.

The profiler is part of both Qt Creator and Qt Design Studio.

QmlLive

QmlLive is a 3rd party tool that offers a QML runtime capable of rendering changes to the code in realtime. It avoids the need to rebuild the application after every code change and install it on the target device. You can also extend it to build a custom runtime that suits your needs.

GammaRay

GammaRay is a useful utility that provides diagnostic information about your application. It is similar to the QML Profiler described in the earlier section, but offers a lot more. For example, the number of items or QObjects created, function calls made, time taken by each function call, property value introspection at runtime, and so on. Such information is very handy, especially while debugging QML applications.

Squish

Squish is a well-known testing tool that automates UI testing by recording your actions or running scripts. Once the tests are setup, UI tests are a lot easier to run.

qmllint

qmllint is a tool shipped with Qt, that verifies the syntatic validity of QML files. It also warns about some QML anti-patterns. If you want to disable a specific warning type, you can find the appropriate flag for doing so by passing --help on the command line.

qmlformat

qmlformat is a tool that automatically formats QML files in accordance with the QML Coding Conventions.

If you pass the -n or --normalize flag, qmlformat groups all properties, functions, and signals together, instead of retaining the order you specified.

By default, qmlformat writes the formatted version of the file to stdout. If you wish to have your file updated in-place specify the -i flag.

You may also change tab widths and line ending types among other settings, either via command line options or by using a settings file called .qmlformat.ini. A default settings file can be obtained by passing the --write-defaults flag.

As with all tools, the -h or --help flag will print some information on all the available options.

Qt Quick Compiler

The Qt Quick Compiler consist of two components:

• QML type compiler
• QML script compiler