Being able to make and run the Qt samples is cool, but to really dig into learning a framework I prefer to have the ability to easily navigate to declarations, easily debug, auto completion, in short – an IDE.

There are two options that I recommend. The first is QtCreator – the IDE that comes with Qt. Although the site claims that “Qt Creator IDE can also be downloaded as a standalone application, although we recommend to get it via the SDK above if you need a complete Qt development environment”, I haven’t managed to find in in the SDK bundle. However you can download binary and source versions from here.

The second option is NetBeans which the cross platform IDE I’ve liked the most since I first tried it in back in 2003. I checked if it has built-in support for Qt. It does.

For developing Qt applications you need only download the smaller sized NetBeans for C++ from this page. You can easily create, compile and run a Qt project from NetBeans by following the explanation on this page.

Having done this, you have access to all the NetBeans goodies when developing your Qt application.

I’m sure Qt will work well with eclipse and other frameworks, though I haven’t checked and therefore can’t comment on them.