Updating CMake project support in Qt Creator

Qt, cmake, pro, Creator

Over the past few weeks, developers have been working on improving CMake support in Qt Creator, Qt Company would like to highlight some of the new features.

Fileapi support

The CMake project has announced a new IDE integration mechanism version 3.14 called fileapi . It provides about the same level of information as the previous recommended mechanism (server mode), but does not require the lengthy cmake process. This makes the new approach use fewer resources while being more robust to users running cmake on the command line.

"Fileapi" is now supported in Qt Creator (master branch).

CMake support in Locator

The developer allowed some time to run the assembly of CMake targets through the Locator. Just press Ctrl-K to focus the locator and then type cm <target> to collect that target.
In upstream, this got a little extension: cmo input will open the target definition in the editor. This works best when your CMake binary supports fileapi: then it will take you to the line where the target is defined. Older CMake binaries will simply open the CMakeLists.txt file in the target's source directory, as there is no line number information.

Opening targets via the context menu

The same information used by the cmo locator is used to populate the Open... menu in the target's context menu. This allows you to jump directly to the line corresponding to the target definition.

Note that this feature was available for one particular version of CMake with server mode support, but the required support in CMake has been removed and only returned in fileapi again.