The FS Editor

It's hard to find a good Qt application built to document good practices. The Qt examples are great, but they are small and built to highlight a single feature. New Qt coders are constantly asking how to build applications - what goes where and how?

Great Qt code is easy to find in the numerous applications available, and the open source applications are good to look at from a learning point of view. The difference between this editor and those other applications is that I have tried to keep the application logic as small as possible - which is of course the direct opposite of a real application.

It's equally hard to find a good example Qt and CMake together. Using CMake is a great choice, and I personally use it whenever I'm allowed. Of course, QMake is an obvious choice for Qt software, and is in many places much easier to use than CMake. But when it comes to power and features, CMake crushes QMake. I have done my fair share of complicated QMake code, and as soon as it gets a bit hairy, QMake is very limited. CMake can do much more than QMake, but at the price of a harder build language.

The FS Editor was created to show an example of how a big software system can be done with Qt, and how you build it with CMake. The focus is on architecture and on showing how features are done, so the editor itself is almost useless - pretty much on the level of Notepad.

Documentation

The package doesn't come with any documentation. Instead, I'm going to write blog entries about this software. See my Qt blog for all the articles. I didn't write any yet, so have patience for a short while. Subscribe to the blog and the articles will soon start coming.

Building on Windows

1. Unpack the zip file.
2. Create a directory next to the sources called build.
3. Run "cmake <sourcedir>" in the build directory.
4. Load the created solution file in Visual Studio and build it.

Building on Linux, Solaris, etc.

1. Unpack the zip file.
2. Create a directory next to the sources called build.
3. Run "cmake <sourcedir>" in the build directory.
4. Run make.

Software License

The license of this software is public domain. You can do with it what ever you want.

Future Development

The first thing I'll do is to start writing some blog reports about this. But when I feel like coding some more on this, I'll add stuff like printing, scripting and UI unit testing, to show off these things as well.

The one thing I don't want is to develop this into a full fledged editor. Because that would hide all those architecture details I'm trying to show. If you want to work on this editor, feel free to fork it and use it in any way you like.