We just published the Qt Creator 2.5 beta. This release is full of goodies, and as usual we'd like to give you a small tour through the new features, though we can't possible cover all of them in one blog post.
The C++11 standard was published last September. We are happy that Qt Creator 2.5 understands more of C++11 e.g. nullptr, constexpr, static_assert, noexcept, inline namespaces, auto, and partially lambda. And as usual we implemented some new refactoring operations, such as:
- A basic refactoring action to insert an #include for an undefined identifier
- A "extract function" refactoring action
- A "rearrange parameter list" refactoring action
- Signature synchronization: changing parameter names in the declaration automatically changes them in the function body
The debuggers used on Linux and MinGW also pretty print some of the new C++11 types, such as std::shared_ptr, std::unique_ptr, std::array. In addition pretty printers for std::complex, boost::posix_time::{ptime,time_duration}, boost::gregorian::date are new in Qt Creator 2.5. Also more often than before, Qt Creator figures out the correct dynamic type of your pointers and thus pretty prints using the dynamic type.
One day before the 2.4 beta was released Open Governance launched. Since then, 78 people used Codereview to submit patches to Qt Creator. That's great and shows the power and ease of use of gerrit. If you haven't used gerrit yet, it's a tremendous improvement to gitorious. It takes a few commands to set up gerrit but afterwards publishing a patch for review is just one git push away, but don't forget to add reviewers to your change.
One of the big contributions to 2.5 is a TODO plugin. It is still lacking some polish so it is disabled by default, though it is already quite useable. Please give it a try by enabling it in Help/About Plugins. Many thanks to Dmitry and Vasiliy. We would like to thank everyone that contributed to Qt Creator and like especially highlight the good work that Orgad does, not only did he contribute over 30 commits to this release but he's also the most active bug reporter apart from our QA team. In fact, he found a crash just hours before the beta release.
Apart from those big features, 2.5 also includes lots of small features, to mention just two:
- A clipboard history, use Ctrl+Shift+V to cycle
- Showing small icons for build errors in the editor margin and updating the line numbers of build errors while editing. See the screenshot above.
And then, before I forget, check out the previous blogs on Debugging Qt Quick 2 – Console API and QML Profiler update .
For even more information on the changes in 2.5, see the changelog.
You can download Qt Creator from http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_Creator_Releases
We appreciate any bug reports, feedback, patches via the mailing list, the bug tracker, gerrit and the #qt-creator IRC channel on freenode.
