We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.9.0!

Generic Programming Language Support

In Qt Creator 4.8 we introduced experimental support for the language server protocol. This enables editing support for a wide range of programming languages through a common protocol. In 4.9 we add support for the document outline, find usages, and also for code actions, which allow the language server to suggest fixes or refactoring actions at a specified place in the code. If the language server of your favorite programming language supports these features, they are now available in Qt Creator as well. Enable the LanguageClient plugin in Help > About Plugins (Qt Creator > About Plugins on macOS) and configure your server in Tools > Options > Language Client to check it out.

Highlighting is still provided by the generic highlighter in these cases. We changed our highlighter to be based on the KSyntaxHighlighting library, which is the library used in KDE for this purpose. Many thanks to the maintainers of KSyntaxHighlighting for making it available to a wide range of uses.

C++ Support

The UI for diagnostics from the Clang analyzer tools got many improvements. They are grouped by file now. Diagnostics from the project's headers files are now also included.

Fix-its show details on what they do when applied. We also added a guard against applying Fix-its to files that have changed in the meantime. In the Clazy configuration you can enable or disable individual checks.

If you enabled a diagnostic to be shown inline in the code editor, you can disable individual checks via a button in the diagnostic's tool tip.

QML Support

We updated our QML parser to Qt 5.12, adding support for ECMAScript 7.

Profiling

Perf is a powerful performance profiling tool for software running on a Linux system. Profile your application via perf with Analyze > Performance Analyzer, after enabling the plugin in Help > About Plugins. The integration in Qt Creator is available for applications running on a local Linux system, and also for applications running on a remote Linux system from a Linux or Windows host.

Generic Projects

Similar to our support for deploying files to a remote system for CMake-based projects, you can now add a QtCreatorDeployment.txt file to your generic project, to specify the necessary information about where to deploy which files.

If your project needs some special compiler flags to be correctly handled by the code model, you can now specify these in a .cxxflags or .cflags file.

Other Improvements

For Windows, we added support for MSVC 2019. On macOS we added a Touch Bar if you run Qt Creator on a MacBook.

For remote Linux targets, we exchanged our Botan-based SSH backend by use of OpenSSH tools. You need to install the tools separately (if you have not already) to be able to benefit from a wide range of encryption and authentication features in Qt Creator. We also added a rsync-based deployment method, as well as support for Run in Terminal.

Version control support has also received many fixes and improvements. The Git Branches view has a new Push action and Git tracks detached HEADs.

These are just some highlights of the many improvements and fixes included in Qt Creator 4.9. Please refer to our change log for a more thorough overview.

Get Qt Creator 4.9.0

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 4.9.0 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 chat.freenode.net, and on the Qt Creator mailing list.