How to get started with Qt

Qt is a very great IDE for designing and programming software in C++. It is officially pronounced at “cute”. It is a cross-platform IDE.

You can download it from http://qt-project.org/downloads

I won’t waste any more time in telling you its more features because you already know it and therefore came on to here. :)

Install it. I suppose that you already know how to install a software.

Now open the Qt Creator

You will get this window.

You can click on the encircled part to learn the UI of Qt Creator. But, here we'll go with other way.

Tick the encircled box and now you will be shown examples and demos.

Now, write in the text field - Application example and then click it when it comes up.

After clicking, you will get this window

There are many menus in right.

Welcome – The first screen you had.

Edit – where you write your source code. Here you can find the whole file hierarchy.

Design – where you design the UI part of your software. The respective file for it has extension of .ui

Debug – I haven’t used it ever. It may be very important tool. It is mainly concerned with debugging (as the name’s telling). The frequency of its use increases as the complexity of your algorithm increases.

Projects – It is for settings.

Analyzer – Third in a row, I haven’t use it much. It is, anyways, used for the animation things and QML part.

Help – It is where we are. It is very important. You can find all documentation here. You need not search Internet for definition or implementation of certain method. It contains it all.

Now, we will go from the top of it. Click MainWindow Class Definition. Now, we will have this window opened.

If you can get the first line of the code, WOW!!!! You know C++ and OOP concept. Go on.

MainWindow is the main window of this application example. It is a class definition, therefore, it is written in the MainWindow.h (header file).

You can see the Q_OBJECT macro in the private section. It must appear in the private section of a class definition that declares its own signals and slots or that uses other services provided by Qt’s meta-object system.

You must be aware with access modifiers like public, private and protected. Here you can see private slots which are used to define methods when the respective signals occur, like when you press button for opening open() method is called, when you press button for saving save() method is called.

When you scroll down, you will see the MainWindow Class Implementation. Here, the methods defined in mainwindow.h is implemented. Please read the encircled lines in the documentation.

Read all the documentation and you will get everything. You will, then, reach on the main() function. main.cpp determines the flow of the software. It is, usually, smallest source file among other source files.

After that you will know about Resource file.

This way, you can read other examples and get to know how to work on Qt.

To know why we make header files and how to make them, read this.

Good Day guys!!!

Happy Coding...