Question

Every time I start a project with some graphical toolkit, one of the first conflicts happen with the decision of how to deal with the visual design and the widget layout: A graphical tool or handcoding?

This is a quite tricky/subjective question because most people will decide based on personal preference. It also depends greatly on the quality of the graphical tool. In this case, I would like to focus just on the latest version of the Qt library. I do not intend to discuss which method is better. I am convinced that the best answer is: depends on the project.

What I want is a reference to a good, non-biased article, based on experience after several projects. The article should just describe the tradeoffs of both choices.

Answer 1

I started with doing everything hand-coded, and of late have been switching to using Qt Designer for most forms. Here are some benefits for each position:

Using Qt Designer

• The biggest time saver for me is managing complex layouts; it saves a lot of tedious coding. Simply (very roughly) arrange your widgets, select them, right-click, and put them in the correct type of layout. Especially as layouts become nested, this is so much easier.
• It tends to keep your implementation files cleaner instead of filling them with all the boilerplate layout code. I’m type-A, so I like that.
• If you are translating your application, it is possible to send your translators the .ui files so they can see on your GUI where the text they are translating will be. (Assuming they are using Qt Linguist.)

Hand-coding

• Control. If you have a layout where you need to instantiate / initialize the controls in a very particular order, or dynamically create the controls based on other criteria (database lookup, etc.), this is the easiest way.
• If you have custom widgets, you can kind-of-sort-of use the Designer, adding the closest built-in QWidget from which your class derived and then “upgrading” it. But you won’t see a preview of your widget unless you make it a designer plugin in a separate project, which is way too much work for most use cases.
• If you have custom widgets that take parameters in their constructor beyond the optional QWidget parent, Designer can’t handle it. You have no choice but to add that control manually.

Miscellaneous

• I don’t use the auto-connect SLOTS and SIGNALS feature (based on naming convention such as “on_my_button_clicked”.) I have found that I almost invariably have to set up this connection at a determinate time, not whenever Qt does it for me.
• For QWizard forms, I have found that I need to use a different UI file for each page. You can do it all in one, but it becomes very awkward to communicate between pages in any kind of custom way.

In summary, I start with Qt Designer and let it take me as far as it can, then hand-code it from there. That’s one nice thing about what Qt Designer generates–it is just another class that becomes a member of your class, and you can access it and manipulate it as you need.