Qt Creator's modes

After Qt Creator starts, you should be presented with the following screen:

The panel on the left allows you to switch between different modes of the IDE:

• Welcome mode: Allows you to quickly open last sessions, projects, load examples, and tutorials.
• Edit mode: The main mode used to edit the source code of your applications.
• Design mode: Contains a visual form editor. Design mode is automatically activated when you create or open a Qt Widgets form file (.ui) or a QML form file (.ui.qml).
• Debug mode: Automatically activated when you launch the application under debugger. It contains additional views for displaying the call stack, the break point list, and values of local variables. More views (such as thread lists or values of registers) can be enabled when needed.
• Projects mode: Allows you to configure how Qt Creator will build and run your application. For example, you can choose which Qt version it will use or add command-line arguments here.
• Help mode: Provides access to the Qt documentation. We will focus on this topic later in the chapter.