Qt Creator 18 Released

October 30, 2025 by Eike Ziller | Comments

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 18!

Qt Creator 18 adds experimental support for Development Containers and many more improvements.

Development Container Support

Qt Creator 18 adds support for development containers to automate setting up the development environment of a project. It detects a "devcontainer.json" file in your project directory and creates a Docker container for it. You can let Qt Creator auto-detect kits or specify custom kits and control other aspects like the command bridge (our service for communicating with remote devices) with Qt Creator specific customizations in the development container definition. Note that it is still experimental and does not support all aspects of development containers yet. Enable the extension to use this functionality. Find out more.

General UI

We added an Overview tab on Welcome mode that aggregates content from the other tabs. It suggests tutorials and examples based on your experience and needs, and highlights developer-targeted posts in the Qt blog.

The notifications received a facelift and are now part of the progress notification popups. You can opt-out of this with Environment > Interface > Prefer banner style info bars over pop-ups.

Editing

We added the option to use tabbed editors (Environment > Interface > Use tabbed editors). But remember faster ways of navigating your code, such as Locator filters for opening files or jumping to specific class or symbol, Follow Symbol, Find References, the Open Documents and File System views, the edit location history Window > Go Back/Forward and the corresponding keyboard shortcuts, and Window > Previous/Next Open Document in History and the corresponding keyboard shortcuts.

For the C++ support we updated Clangd/LLVM to the 21.1 release for our prebuilt binaries. Additionally, the built-in code model received a wide range of fixes for newer C++ features. We added quick fixes for removing curly braces and for adding definitions for static data members.

For QML you can now download and use the latest QML Language Server even if you are using older Qt versions for your projects (in the QML Language Server settings in Preferences > Language Client).

We also added support for GitHub Enterprise environments for GitHub Copilot.

Projects

We moved the ".user" files that contain the Qt Creator specific project settings into the ".qtcreator/" subdirectory of the project directory. Existing ".user" files from older projects are still updated for compatibility though.

In Projects mode you can now choose to only show kits that are actually usable by the project, or only kits that the project is already configured for. We also split up the Run page into Deploy Settings and Run Settings, and together with the Build Settings moved them out of the kit selection to tabs in the content view. Normally the run configurations of the various build configurations are independent of each other. In Qt Creator 18 we have added the option to sync the run configurations within a single kit, or even between all kits that the project is configured for.

For CMake projects we now also support Test Presets and added a Locator filter "ct" for running CTest based tests. We also fixed building CMake projects for all build configurations (Build > Build Project for All Configurations).

Devices

We added a configuration for various tools on remote Linux devices, like GDB server, CMake, clangd, rsync, qmake, and more, and the option to auto-detect them. This improves the configuration of remote devices as build devices. More is to come in future releases in this regard. You can now also decide if Qt Creator should try to automatically re-connect to devices at startup with a new Auto-connect on startup setting. We also fixed that it wasn't possibly to use rsync for deployment when building on a remote device as well as using a remote target device.

Other Improvements

Qt Creator 18 comes with many more improvements and fixes. For example the Git commit editor now provides many more actions on files, like staging, unstaging, and directly adding files to ".gitignore".

Please have a look at our change log for more detailed information.

Get Qt Creator 18

The new version is available as an update in the Qt Online Installer (commercial, opensource). You also find commercially licensed offline installers on the Qt Account Portal, and opensource packages on our opensource download page. This is a free upgrade for all users.

Please post issues in our bug tracker. You can also find us on IRC on #qt-creator on irc.libera.chat, and on the Qt Creator mailing list.

You can read the Qt Creator Manual in Qt Creator in the Help mode or access it online in the Qt documentation portal.

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