====== Monkey Studio ======

[[http://www.monkeystudio.org/|Monkey Studio]] is a Qt-centric IDE and supports Qt projects in a number of languages. It seems to be well thought out with the exception of a couple things.

First, rather than using the standard GDB debugger directly, it uses [[http://code.google.com/p/beaverdbg/|Beaver Debugger]]--a wrapper for GDB stripped out of Qt Creator. A Beaver Debugger is available for OS X and Windows, but there is no package available for Linux, either in the Debian repos or from the authors.

Second, there is no template to make a Qt project with a form based on a *.ui-file. I'm pretty sure it's not a big deal to create such a template, but it would be nice if it existed by default. Starting with a Qt GUI project and then adding a Qt Form to it is a tedious and (at least for the one time I tried it) error-prone process. This is easily ameliorated with a {{:qt:qt_application.zip|new template}}.

The integrated Qt Designer is well done. That along with support for lots of languages (including Python) makes this an appealing option. The fact that it's C++-based means it starts up pretty quickly (an issue with the Java-based IDEs). Hoping that Beaver support improves.

===== Pros =====
  * Really good integration of Qt Designer
  * Very fast
  * Multi-language support
  * Project file structure and ''*.pro'' files seem to be compatible with Qt Creator

===== Cons =====
  * No available template for a project in the style of Qt Creator or Netbeans Qt. (I've {{:qt:qt_application.zip|made one}} though.)
  * Debugger seems to be a Frankenstein from Qt Creator and is [[https://code.google.com/p/beaverdbg/|"frozen and waits for a new enthusiastic maintainer."]]
  * No apparent toolbar item for "Run" or "Debug". You can however assign keyboard shortcuts.
  * No profiling
  * Untested code completion

===== TODO =====
  * Add Beaver Debugger via PPA and see how well it works

===== Thoughts =====
Lack of debugging makes this less than appealing for serious work. Debugging is not available at all for PyQt projects--in spite of the good PyQt templates, etc. I really hope to see this IDE develop.