Creating Extensions and Plugins

At its very core, Qt Creator consists of a plugin loader that loads and runs a set of C++-based plugins and Lua-based extensions, which then actually provide the functionality that you know from Qt Creator the IDE. So, even the main application window and menus are all provided by plugins. Plugins can use different means to provide other plugins access to their functionality and to allow them to extend certain aspects of the application.

For example the Core plugin, which is the very basic plugin that must be present for Qt Creator to run at all, provides the main window itself, and API for adding menu items, modes, editor types, navigation panels and many other things.

The TextEditor plugin provides a framework and base implementation for different text editors with highlighting, completion and folding, that is then used by other plugins to add more specialized text editor types to Qt Creator, like for editing C/C++ or .pro files.

You can extend Qt Creator by writing:

• Lua-based extensions
• C++-based plugins

Lua-Based Extensions

A Lua extension consists of a Lua script that specifies the extension and loads it. Therefore, you don't need to compile exensions and the API is stable. However, the API doesn't support everything you can do with C++ yet. For a list of supported Lua modules, see Qt Creator API.

C++-Based Plugins

Basics

After reading the following topics, you will understand the contents of a basic extension or plugin, how to write a specification file for it, what its lifecycle is, and what the general principles for extending its functionality and providing interfaces for other exensions and plugins are. You can then write your first extension or plugin.

• Getting Qt and Qt Creator
• Creating Lua-Based Extensions
• Creating C++-Based Plugins
• Plugin Meta Data
• Plugin Life Cycle
• Distributing Extensions and Plugins

Topics

• Adding Tests

Design Principles

• The Plugin Manager, the Object Pool, and Registered Objects
• The Action Manager and Commands