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Qt Inspector

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

Screenshot

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

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.