Show command prompt with Qt Creator and CMake

Question

The dev environment in question consists of:

• Windows 7
• MinGW (g++)
• CMake
• Qt Creator

The problem is that Qt Creator, a lovely IDE as far as I can tell, does not display programs' command-line output. It seems to have its own proprietary debug pane, but it doesn't give me, for example, runtime errors. It just tells me that the program has failed and gives me the exit code. I'm using Creator only for its C++ capabilities, and not using Qt in any way, so the proprietary pane is useless to me.

So I ask this: Can something be done? Am I missing something really, stupidly obvious like a built-in command line? Or, if not, can I at least use some filthy and/or repulsive hack to get it to display the Windows command prompt upon running a program?

Last thing; I did do some research, and found a way to edit the Qt project file to display the prompt, but... I'm using CMake, not Qt projects. So that doesn't answer my question. If I can do something similar with CMakeLists.txt, that would be wonderful. But Google has failed me on that front, so I'm not holding out too much hope.

EDIT:

I'm specifically worried about runtime errors. cout and printf are rerouted to Qt Creator's window, so that's fine. I don't get runtime errors unless the debugger catches them, and the frequency of that is less than ideal.

Answer 1

Windows GUI programs don't have standard output.

In Windows there are two possible entry points in the standard runtime. The console one and the windows one. The console one will inherit console window from parent process or create a new one and connect the standard input/output/error streams to it, while the windows one will leave them unconnected unless they were explicitly redirected by the invoking process. A Qt application is (probably; you could have console Qt-Core application) a GUI application and Qt Creator (nor any other Windows IDE) does not redirect the output explicitly. Therefore the standard output is not open at all and the writes are being discarded.

However windows have separate logging facility for debugging purpose. This is what you see in the debug window. You can write to it using the native OutputDebugString API. I am sure you can also direct the Qt debug log there.

Note, that when it tells you the program has exited with status 0, it means the program ran, which in turn means it compiled successfully and thus there were no errors from g++. There may have been warnings, in which case you should see them in the appropriate other window. Compiler and program output are different things; the IDE does read the compiler output.