[Qt-creator] ideas

[Daniel Teske]

 > Honestly, for anything other than a toy project you're going to have 
a lot of sources/headers anyway and there's not a whole lot you can do 
in a folder view/source file view.  (I use open documents...which is 
useful for decent sized projects).


The consensus on the creator team, is mostly the same. (Not all agree, 
though.)
That is a project tree works fine for smaller projects, but it has quite 
a few scalability issues for projects. They can be overcome by e.g. 
using manual organization like Visual Studio allows with virtual folders 
or somewhat by organizing the files finer.
Also the project tree isn't very keyboard friendly. So in Creator we 
have added quite a few navigation shortcuts which in my opinion do scale 
better. And you should really try to use them, chances are that you 
won't miss the project tree.
That is:
Ctrl+k (for the Locator) + filename, usually you can open a file with ~6 
keystrokes.

In most cases though, you don't want to open a file, usally you want to 
go to say the implementation of a class, or the implementation of a 
method and for those cases we have a special shortcuts:
Ctrl+k :, Ctrk+k m, Ctrl+k c, Ctrl+k ., which do
: => All symbols
m => methods
c => classes
. => symbols in current file (I'm not sure which version we added that.)
You don't need to remember all of them, I mainly use the shortcut for 
methods and classes and don't use the other. And you are exactly where 
you want to go too, not on line 1, looking at a fullscreen copyright 
header.

There is one shortcut that is even more usefull, that is F2, which 
simply is: Follow symbol under cursor. That is if the method, class 
implementation is actually used in the place you are currently working 
on, then navigating there is just ONE keypress.
And that the normal case. It also works on #include lines and macros.

We also have Alt+Left, Alt+Right for navigating back and forward through 
your history. Especially Alt+Left is handy after following the code with 
F2 a few times.

And Ctrl+Tab to circle between your open documents, sorted by when you 
last used them.

In between those shortcuts, I haven't used the project tree for opening 
files for a long time, and have it acutally hidden.

We'll continue to improve the project tree to make it more useable for 
people that want to use it and are open for outside contributions.
But if you want to navigate your project efficiently, we have build a 
few tools for you, which beat the project tree easily.


daniel