Cross Platform Qt 4 IDEs

There has been quite alot of activity in the Qt 4 IDEs arena lately. QIde has been renamed to QDevelop, Cobras has been released and QDev has been discontinued, but is followed by Edyuk.

Before I continue I would like to emphasis the cross platform aspect of the IDEs. To me, this means being available for atleast X11/Linux/gcc and Windows/mingw. It also means not being a KDE application that can be compiled for Windows + Mac - the aim here is to support Qt development on Qt's platform. Not moving KDE to new platforms.

QDev/Edyuk is, to my knowledge, the oldest project of the three. The last QDev release dates back to February 2006 while Edyuk has blog entries dating to October 2006. The project was started by FullMetalcoder of QtCentre, and he still maintains it. The pcroject seems somewhat incomplete, but has interesting features such as an integrated version of Designer.

QDevelop is developed by Jean-Luc Biord of qtfr.org. The project was first released in June 2006 and has already a working plug-in system, a class explorer, code completion, project management and debugging support. It uses ctags, gdb and Qt 4 and can be run on Windows and Linux. The project does not integrate Designer, but invokes it as an external application.

Cobras was released just yesterday by Piotr Pszczolkowski. From the projects homepage is looks as if is it is a simple code editor that can handle qmake's pro-files and can build n' run the resulting binaries. The class explorer does not seem to be working, but the application seems stable enough. I could not find a way to edit the actual pro-file, but that might just be me. There are no notion about working cross platform on the site but I can successfully run it on Windows.

To summarize my impressions, QDevelop seems the most mature while Edyuk has some interesting features (such as integrating Designer). Cobras currently seems to be a pro-file aware text editor with integrated compilation. My hope for the future is for more cooperation. Having lots of paralell projects is a normal way to try architectures, but hopefully the developers can agree on one platform and focus their efforts there.

Update! Nicolas kindly pointed me to the new site of Qt4DS, now known as MonkeyStudio. This is one of the oldest Qt 4 IDE projects (competing with Edyuk) and seems quite mature. It has project management, code completion as well as translations. When it comes to translations it has got a really interesting approach and seems to be supporting this better than any of the other alternatives.