Qt Inspector

Whilst debugging a widget layout problem a few days ago, I was looking around for a tool to view the structure of a Qt application without having to recompile it, or in other words, Firebug / Web Inspector for Qt widgets.  I found the KSpy tool in the KDE repositories which is in need of some love and there are a variety of tools to aid in runtime debugging and modification of QML but not much in the way of tools for QWidget-based interfaces.  Please let me know in the comments if I missed any.

I have put together a simple tool called Qt Inspector.

Qt Inspector starts a specified application or connects to an existing Qt application and once connected can:

• Browse the object tree of Qt applications.
• View properties of objects
• Edit properties of objects
• Locate a widget in the object tree by clicking on it in the application
• Copy a reference to an object for use in a debugger (eg. to manipulate it by calling methods on it, examine member fields, setup conditional breakpoints)

Here is a screenshot of Qt Inspector connected to Dolphin showing the widget tree for the settings dialog. Like the Web Inspector or Firebug, this can be used to tweak styling settings, layouts and other properties without a recompile.

Usage:

Qt Inspector can either attach to an existing application or launch
a specified application and then attach to it.

From a terminal, this can be done with:

qtinspector [process ID]
qtinspector [program name] [args]

Design:

Qt Inspector operates by injecting a helper library into the target process using gdb.  This helper library sets up a local socket and listens for requests from the inspector process. The inspector and target process communicate via protocol buffer messages over this socket.

The inspector uses Qt's meta-object system to fetch the properties of an object and read/write their values, so properties need to be declared with Q_PROPERTY for them to be visible to the inspector.

Source:

The code is up on GitHub.  Please download it and give it a whirl.  Happy forking :) 

Update:  Eva Brucherseifer let me know about the Basyskom Inspector tool in Gitorious.  In addition to being able to select and inspect widgets it can also view signals and slots, application resources and take screenshots.