Qt IDE

LeanCreator

The Qt project has a long history of experimenting with different code licenses and business models. This has sometimes brought it into conflict with the Linux community, with its early proprietary license fueling the foundations of Gnome, for instance. It has since remained open source, but various new developments and components have drifted into and out of inclusion as the Qt project experimented with new funding models. Even recently, the current custodians of Qt, the Qt Company, announced it would only release LTS versions of Qt 6 and not intermediate patches, forcing the KDE project to maintain its own. All this leaves Qt's sub-projects, such as the brilliant platform-agnostic Qt Creator, stuck in the middle of a storm they have no control over, and no way for users to know whether (or how) such sub-projects may survive.

Qt Creator has always been released under the terms of the GPL 3, but it has also become more interwoven within the Qt framework and its own priorities. This is what motivated the creation of LeanCreator, a fork of Qt Creator that's attempting to keep Qt Creator lean, open, and adaptable. It is itself built from another fork, this time of Qt itself, in the shape of a project called LeanQt, forked from Qt 5.6.3, which was the last version released under LGPL v2.1 and v3. Both Lean* projects have done a brilliant job at extracting only what's necessary into their respective codebases, and LeanCreator builds into a single executable with no further dependences or shared libraries. It's always been a brilliant application, with powerful syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and integrated GDB support, and these features remain. But significant features have also been dropped, including Python, JavaScript, CML, CMake, Autotools and make support, integrated version control, and Vim bindings – which is maybe a step too far. CMake has been replaced by Busy, which does require some time to learn, but the results are worth it, and unlike the uncertainty of Qt Creator's future, will remain firmly in the open source domain.

Project Website

https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanCreator

LeanCreator drops Qt Creator's dependency on both qmake and QML and replaces these with deep Busy integration, itself a replacement for qmake.

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