Qt Inspector

Qt Inspector is a tool to browse the object/widget tree of Qt applications.

Qt Inspector starts a specified application or connects to a specified process and once connected it 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

Building Qt inspector

Qt Inspector currently runs on Linux and Mac.

You will need protoc in your PATH. On Debian/Ubuntu, install protobuf-compiler and libprotobuf-dev.

    cmake <path to Qt inspector src>
    make -j2

Usage

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

Recommended usage is to specify the program name and arguments.

    ./qtinspector <program name> <args>
    ./qtinspector <process ID of running Qt app>

Design

Qt Inspector operates by injecting a helper library into the target process when starting it using LD_PRELOAD / DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES or via gdb (if attaching to an existing process).

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.