Setting up QtCreator

QtCreator is a free and popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Originally designed to create Qt applications, it is also very useful to edit C++ code in general.

The main benefits of working with an IDE are:

• code completion
• code indexing
• integration with the compiler and debugger

Eclipse is another popular IDE but we found that QtCreator was working better.

Installing QtCreator

sudo apt-get install qtcreator

In order to be able to work with ROS code, QtCreator needs to be able to source the environment (your .bashrc). You can either launch it from a terminal, or create a custom qtcreator.desktop file:

First copy the standard qtcreator.desktop file: cp /usr/share/applications/qtcreator.desktop ~

Then edit it and change the Exec line into: Exec=bash -i -c qtcreator %F

Finally, remove the QtCreator icon from the launcher (if present) by right clicking it and selecting "Unlock from launcher"; drag and drop the qtcreator.desktop file you just created to the launcher.

Configuring QtCreator

QtCreator offers lots of options. The most important one is to configure the code style to indent using 2 spaces.

1. Open "Tools > Options ..."
2. Under "C++ > Code Style", copy the GNU style (name the copy driving for instance), and edit it
3. Set the tab and indent size to 2 (spaces only)

Opening a ROS project

1. Click "File > Open file or projet" and browse to the CMakeLists.txt at the root of your catkin source space (~/catkin_ws/src/CMakeListst.txt)
2. set the build location to the build space of the catking workspace (~/catkin_ws/build).
3. run cmake with no arguments

It should start parsing the packages in the project (as with catkin_make) and the list of packages should appear in the project view. Use Ctrl+B to build.

source: http://wiki.ros.org/IDEs#QtCreator