Qt Creator 5.0 released

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 5.0 !

As announced in the 4.15 release blog post we are switching to a semantic versioning scheme, so this is the first major version update of Qt Creator in a long time! Don't expect a completely rewritten IDE though - we are still following the incremental development style, and the next feature release of Qt Creator will be 6.0 towards the end of the year.

Experimental Features

Qt Creator 5.0 comes with experimental support for Clangd as the backend for the C/C++ code model. This feature is optional and turned off by default. It replaces the libclang based code model, building on our support for the Language Server Protocol. As mentioned this is still experimental. Completion doesn't work yet and is still provided via libclang. Some of the other functionality only works with a development build of Clangd from the "main" branch. If you want to try it, enable "Use clangd" in Tools > Options > C++ > Clangd (or Qt Creator > Preferences > C++ > Clangd on macOS) and provide it with a recent Clangd executable.

Another experimental feature that is shipped with 5.0 is some support for building and running applications in Docker containers. This is very experimental and currently only works on Linux hosts with CMake as the build system for your projects. After you enabled the experimental plugin in Help > About Plugins (or Qt Creator > About Plugins on macOS), you can create a Docker device in the Device settings and set that as a "Build device" and "Device" in a Kit.

Editing

The C++ code model received various fixes. When you rename a symbol, we no longer select files by default that are not directly related to your project, like Qt headers, even if they contain the symbol. Changes to ".ui" and ".scxml" files are now immediately reflected in the code model without re-compilation.

We updated the QML code model to Qt 6.2, and fixed various issues with newer features of QML.

If your language server supports progress notification, we show them in Qt Creator as well now. We also added support for code snippets provided by the server.

Projects

Cristian published a separate blog post, highlighting the improvements for CMake in Qt Creator 5, so I won't repeat that here.

Generally we worked on reducing a freeze that could happen after loading larger projects in Qt Creator. This should behave much better now.

We updated Qbs to latest 1.20, and reduced the impact that the Qbs project management had on startup when you had many kits.

Platforms

We added support for MSVC ARM toolchains, and improved the experience when running Intel-builds of Qt Creator on M1 Macs. Android 12 is now properly handled in Qt Creator.

Please check our change log for a more complete list of improvements.

Get Qt Creator 5.0

The opensource version is available on the Qt download page under "Qt Creator", and you find commercially licensed packages on the Qt Account Portal. Qt Creator 5.0 is also available as an update in the online installer. Please post issues in our bug tracker. You can also find us on IRC on #qt-creator on irc.libera.chat, and on the Qt Creator mailing list.

You can read the Qt Creator Manual in Qt Creator in the Help mode or access it online in the Qt documentation portal.