Qt Software announces new Qt IDE, Greenhouse

Qt Software has announced Greenhouse, a new integrated development environment (IDE) for Qt developers. The announcement was made during Qt Developer Days, held over October 14th and 15th in Munich, and was primarily a discussion of the design principles behind new C++ IDE. The new IDE is expected to be released as an alpha preview in a few weeks time at the project's web site. A decision over whether the IDE will be open source has yet to be made but the developers are reported to favour GPL licensing for Greenhouse. Greenhouse will run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Greenhouse has been designed with users of vi and emacs in mind, looking to convert those users to a richer environment without losing the text-oriented focus of working with a pure editor. Greenhouse can also be completely driven from the keyboard and any part of the interface can be masked out in Greenhouse, so that the developer can work in a full screen text editor, yet still have access to Greenhouse's features which are contained in different modes of the IDE.

Those features include a debugger, compiler and tools for generating Qt user interfaces, along with integrated documentation viewing and error highlighting. Greenhouse's other design goal was to be more agile, avoiding the long load times of IDEs such as Eclipse.

Greenhouse has been in development for three years as a 20 per cent time project. Qt Software developers work a four day week, with the fifth day, "Creative Friday" dedicated to developing new ideas. Qt Software was known as Trolltech before their acquisition by Nokia at the start of 2008.

(djwm)