[Development] Deprecation of Qt Quick Controls 1

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hi all,

It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt Quick Controls 1.
After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling - but it comes at a high price.

Performance is very problematic with the module and we now offer more modern styles in Controls 2.
In addition customizing the styles in Controls 2 is possible in different ways. There is the image based style that is especially accessible to graphical designers. There is the general styling that has become really cheap now (thanks to the deferred execution patches), so replacing parts of the ready-made controls does come at no cost. Finally writing a completely custom style is entirely possible, using the logic of Controls 2 as building blocks. In fact I see Controls 2 as being part of Qt Quick, the part that has been missing for a long time and that completes the story to make developing applications with Qt Quick easy. With the recent updates to the Qt Quick Designer in Qt Creator and additions to make Controls 2 more desktop friendly for modern applications, I'd recommend everyone to move over.

Next to that we have picked up Qt Widgets lately again and fixes are making their way into the module. For applications that need to look and behave like traditional desktop applications, this is an alternative.

As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce the attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix critical issues in the future.

As always, feedback welcome :)

Cheers,
Frederik

[Helmut Mülner]

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt Quick Controls 1.

After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would
make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling - but it
comes at a high price.

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
[…]
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce the

attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This
means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix
critical issues in the future.

In my application I mostly use Controls 2 but have to add some controls from
Qt Quick Controls 1, e.g. TableView, SplitView, Calendar, ScrollView. It
would be nice to have these controls available in Controls 2 before you
deprecate Controls 1.



Regards

Helmut

[NIkolai Marchenko]

I basically can't use Controls 2 in my application because combobox in
controls 2 has extremely out of place style for desktop applications, is
too bloated and you can't control it enough to make it look more like
Controls 1.
Admittedly, I almost do not use QML in my apps but I wasn't able to find an
easy solution to make combobox tolerable for desktop

Post by Frederik Gladhorn

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt

Quick Controls 1.
After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would
make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling - but
it comes at a high price.

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
[
]
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce

the attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This
means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix
critical issues in the future.
In my application I mostly use Controls 2 but have to add some controls
from Qt Quick Controls 1, e.g. TableView, SplitView, Calendar, ScrollView.
It would be nice to have these controls available in Controls 2 before you
deprecate Controls 1.
Regards
Helmut
_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development

[NIkolai Marchenko]

And no, widgets is not an alterlative to proper qml controls on desktop
when you want custom interface.
I have an app that uses qml to draw a custom listview for users, it would
be extremely hard to replicate it with widgets and why should I do that
when I have qml?

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
I basically can't use Controls 2 in my application because combobox in
controls 2 has extremely out of place style for desktop applications, is
too bloated and you can't control it enough to make it look more like
Controls 1.
Admittedly, I almost do not use QML in my apps but I wasn't able to find
an easy solution to make combobox tolerable for desktop

Post by Frederik Gladhorn

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt

Quick Controls 1.
After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would
make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling - but
it comes at a high price.

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
[
]
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce

the attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This
means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix
critical issues in the future.
In my application I mostly use Controls 2 but have to add some controls
from Qt Quick Controls 1, e.g. TableView, SplitView, Calendar, ScrollView.
It would be nice to have these controls available in Controls 2 before you
deprecate Controls 1.
Regards
Helmut
_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development

[Jean-Michaël Celerier]

KDE has some codes that enables simulation of the "native" style through
QtQuickControls 2 if it can be useful :
https://github.com/KDE/qqc2-desktop-style

However, even though Qt Quick Controls (and Qt Quick in general) are both
very nice, I think that a big missing part is CSS-like properties, that is,
properties that would apply to whole subtrees of QML components easily.
Ableton has graciously provided some code for this :
https://github.com/Ableton/aqt-stylesheets but it would be nice to have a
syntaxic solution part of Qt proper...


Best,
-------
Jean-Michaël Celerier
http://www.jcelerier.name

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
And no, widgets is not an alterlative to proper qml controls on desktop
when you want custom interface.
I have an app that uses qml to draw a custom listview for users, it would
be extremely hard to replicate it with widgets and why should I do that
when I have qml?

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
I basically can't use Controls 2 in my application because combobox in
controls 2 has extremely out of place style for desktop applications, is
too bloated and you can't control it enough to make it look more like
Controls 1.
Admittedly, I almost do not use QML in my apps but I wasn't able to find
an easy solution to make combobox tolerable for desktop

Post by Frederik Gladhorn

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt

Quick Controls 1.
After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would
make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling -
but it comes at a high price.

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
[
]
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce

the attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This
means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix
critical issues in the future.
In my application I mostly use Controls 2 but have to add some controls
from Qt Quick Controls 1, e.g. TableView, SplitView, Calendar, ScrollView.
It would be nice to have these controls available in Controls 2 before you
deprecate Controls 1.
Regards
Helmut
_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development

_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development

[Konstantin Tokarev]

And no, widgets is not an alterlative to proper qml controls on desktop when you want custom interface.
I have an app that uses qml to draw a custom listview for users, it would be extremely hard to replicate it with widgets and why should I do that when I have qml?

FWIW, it's not really hard to implement your own ItemView widgets.


-- 
Regards,
Konstantin

[NIkolai Marchenko]

even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO
I doubt it. I really don't want to delve into manual painter usage and
styleoptions when I can just quickly make such stuff with qml listview.
And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is that
combobox becomes quite horrible

Post by NIkolai Marchenko

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
And no, widgets is not an alterlative to proper qml controls on desktop

when you want custom interface.

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
I have an app that uses qml to draw a custom listview for users, it

would be extremely hard to replicate it with widgets and why should I do
that when I have qml?
FWIW, it's not really hard to implement your own ItemView widgets.
--
Regards,
Konstantin

[Helmut Mülner]

* And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is that combobox becomes quite horrible



I use something like this for a decent looking combobox:



ComboBox {

id: comboBox

Layout.fillWidth: true

height: 30

Layout.maximumHeight: 30

Layout.minimumHeight: 30

font.pointSize: 10

anchors.verticalCenter: parent.verticalCenter

textRole: "name"

model: myModel

delegate: ItemDelegate {

width: comboBox.width

height: 30

contentItem: Text {

id: itemDelegateText

text: name

font: comboBox.font

elide: Text.ElideRight

verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter

}

highlighted: comboBox.highlightedIndex == index

}

}



Cheers,

Helmut

[NIkolai Marchenko]

Thanks, I will see how it works. Though I will use the model: 10 syntax
like this :(

Ø And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is
that combobox becomes quite horrible
ComboBox {
id: *comboBox*
Layout.fillWidth: true
height: 30
Layout.maximumHeight: 30
Layout.minimumHeight: 30
font.pointSize: 10
anchors.verticalCenter: *parent*.verticalCenter
textRole: "name"
model: myModel
delegate: ItemDelegate {
width: *comboBox*.width
height: 30
contentItem: Text {
id: *itemDelegateText*
text: name
font: *comboBox*.font
elide: Text.ElideRight
verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter
}
highlighted: *comboBox*.highlightedIndex == index
}
}
Cheers,
Helmut

[NIkolai Marchenko]

I meant, I will *lose* model:10 syntax like this
(mailing lists and unfixable wording errors, ugh)

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
Thanks, I will see how it works. Though I will use the model: 10 syntax
like this :(

Ø And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is
that combobox becomes quite horrible
ComboBox {
id: *comboBox*
Layout.fillWidth: true
height: 30
Layout.maximumHeight: 30
Layout.minimumHeight: 30
font.pointSize: 10
anchors.verticalCenter: *parent*.verticalCenter
textRole: "name"
model: myModel
delegate: ItemDelegate {
width: *comboBox*.width
height: 30
contentItem: Text {
id: *itemDelegateText*
text: name
font: *comboBox*.font
elide: Text.ElideRight
verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter
}
highlighted: *comboBox*.highlightedIndex == index
}
}
Cheers,
Helmut

[Konstantin Tokarev]

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO
I doubt it. I really don't want to delve into manual painter usage and styleoptions when I can just quickly make such stuff with qml listview.

FWIW, in company where I work we routinely did such UIs for embedded systems with Qt 4 and widgets. However, it required quite a bit of work to implement basic ListView with pluggable renderers. However, we didn't use QStyle and style options, and had no tough controls like combo box there.

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is that combobox becomes quite horrible

Post by Konstantin Tokarev

And no, widgets is not an alterlative to proper qml controls on desktop when you want custom interface.
I have an app that uses qml to draw a custom listview for users, it would be extremely hard to replicate it with widgets and why should I do that when I have qml?

FWIW, it's not really hard to implement your own ItemView widgets.
--
Regards,
Konstantin

-- 
Regards,
Konstantin

[NIkolai Marchenko]

I really don't want to go there for a project I am not paid to develop :)

Post by NIkolai Marchenko

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO
I doubt it. I really don't want to delve into manual painter usage and

styleoptions when I can just quickly make such stuff with qml listview.
FWIW, in company where I work we routinely did such UIs for embedded
systems with Qt 4 and widgets. However, it required quite a bit of work to
implement basic ListView with pluggable renderers. However, we didn't use
QStyle and style options, and had no tough controls like combo box there.

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is

that combobox becomes quite horrible

Post by NIkolai Marchenko

Post by Konstantin Tokarev

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
And no, widgets is not an alterlative to proper qml controls on

desktop when you want custom interface.

Post by NIkolai Marchenko

Post by Konstantin Tokarev

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
I have an app that uses qml to draw a custom listview for users, it

would be extremely hard to replicate it with widgets and why should I do
that when I have qml?

Post by NIkolai Marchenko

Post by Konstantin Tokarev
FWIW, it's not really hard to implement your own ItemView widgets.
--
Regards,
Konstantin

--
Regards,
Konstantin

[Olivier Goffart]

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO
I doubt it. I really don't want to delve into manual painter usage and
styleoptions when I can just quickly make such stuff with qml listview.
And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is that
combobox becomes quite horrible

That can be done without too much difficulty. For reference, i have been
doing the ui for the ownCloud client with a QTreeView:
https://imgur.com/a/7ore2

"All you have to do," is create a QAbstractItemDelegate, then you can paint
anything with QPainter. It is just a bunch of drawRectangle and drawText,
and for the style element, you can use style()->drawComplexControl
You have to layout everything by manually computing the position of items.
The logic of the embedded combobox might be a bit tricky but perhaps a spinbox
would be much easier to draw.

Clearly this is not the prettiest code ever
https://code.woboq.org/owncloud/client/src/gui/folderstatusdelegate.cpp.html#_ZNK3OCC20FolderStatusDelegate5paintEP8QPainterRK20QStyleOptionViewItemRK11QModelIndex

So while it is possible to do this, this is indeed much harder and less
maintainable than with QML.

Unfortunately, it seems that the story for QML on desktop is less than ideal.
There is still much polishing to do to get there. And the fact that Qt Quick
Controls 2 does not seem to have the desktop as a first place citizen is worrying.

The Qt Company does not seem to be interested in the desktop. The fact that
QtCreator went back from using some of QML for example just shows that the
situation is regressing rather than improving.

[NIkolai Marchenko]

Well, thank you for your example, but I would rather code a completely
custom combobox in QML than go this route
(even with my qml skills noobish at best it seems a more reasonable idea,
than coding a "widgets monster" )

And for the time being I will just stick with Controls 1 as I want to be
improving the core of my app
rather than spend weeks of my weekend time fixing UI problem introduced by
controls deprecation.

I just wanted to highlight the problem, that it is really, really too early
to cycle out V1.
And that combobox V2 is completely unacceptable on desktop. I still have to
see the "fusion" suggestion though

Post by Olivier Goffart

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO
I doubt it. I really don't want to delve into manual painter usage and
styleoptions when I can just quickly make such stuff with qml listview.
And basically the only thing that really hurts me with controls 2 is that
combobox becomes quite horrible

That can be done without too much difficulty. For reference, i have been
https://imgur.com/a/7ore2
"All you have to do," is create a QAbstractItemDelegate, then you can paint
anything with QPainter. It is just a bunch of drawRectangle and drawText,
and for the style element, you can use style()->drawComplexControl
You have to layout everything by manually computing the position of items.
The logic of the embedded combobox might be a bit tricky but perhaps a spinbox
would be much easier to draw.
Clearly this is not the prettiest code ever
https://code.woboq.org/owncloud/client/src/gui/
folderstatusdelegate.cpp.html#_ZNK3OCC20FolderStatusDelegate5
paintEP8QPainterRK20QStyleOptionViewItemRK11QModelIndex
So while it is possible to do this, this is indeed much harder and less
maintainable than with QML.
Unfortunately, it seems that the story for QML on desktop is less than ideal.
There is still much polishing to do to get there. And the fact that Qt Quick
Controls 2 does not seem to have the desktop as a first place citizen is worrying.
The Qt Company does not seem to be interested in the desktop. The fact that
QtCreator went back from using some of QML for example just shows that the
situation is regressing rather than improving.
--
Olivier
Woboq - Qt services and support - https://woboq.com -
https://code.woboq.org

[Kevin Kofler]

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO

Maybe try using QListWidget::setItemWidget? That should even let you assign
some widget layed out in Qt Designer.

Also FYI, since QListWidget is a subclass of QListView, you can actually
also use a QAbstractItemDelegate with a QListWidget (hint:
QListWidget::itemFromIndex does wonders to actually find the QListWidgetItem
in the delegate), even though the documentation omits that detail or even
tries to imply otherwise. (And the same goes for tree widgets, just
s/List/Tree/g in the previous sentence.) Kompare actually declares a
subclass of QTreeWidgetItem with a virtual paintCell method, subclass which
is the superclass of all the concrete item subclasses, which
implement/override the paintCell method, and then sets a (subclassed)
QStyledItemDelegate that just calls that virtual paintCell method when the
tree widget asks it (the delegate) to paint the item. (For a bit of history:
The virtual paintCell method in the item was how things worked in Qt 3 out
of the box. It took me just a few lines of item delegate code to emulate
that way of working in Qt 4 and 5, and I think this can be a convenient
trick even in new code.)

Kevin Kofler

[Eike Hein]

Post by Kevin Kofler

Post by NIkolai Marchenko
even stuff like that?
https://imgur.com/a/tTFeO

Maybe try using QListWidget::setItemWidget? That should even let you assign
some widget layed out in Qt Designer.

The KWidgetItemDelegate class in KDE's KItemViews library (which has no
other KDE dependencies) is also quite convenient for things like this
and used in KDE apps for complex item views with widget-embedding
delegates.



Cheers,
Eike

[Mitch Curtis]

Have you tried the Fusion style in 5.10?

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquickcontrols2-fusion.html

From: Development [mailto:development-bounces+mitch.curtis=***@qt-project.org] On Behalf Of NIkolai Marchenko
Sent: Wednesday, 7 February 2018 2:10 PM
To: Helmut MÃŒlner <***@gmail.com>
Cc: Qt development mailing list <***@qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Development] Deprecation of Qt Quick Controls 1

I basically can't use Controls 2 in my application because combobox in controls 2 has extremely out of place style for desktop applications, is too bloated and you can't control it enough to make it look more like Controls 1.
Admittedly, I almost do not use QML in my apps but I wasn't able to find an easy solution to make combobox tolerable for desktop

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt Quick Controls 1.

After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling - but it comes at a high price.

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
[
]
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce the attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix critical issues in the future.

In my application I mostly use Controls 2 but have to add some controls from Qt Quick Controls 1, e.g. TableView, SplitView, Calendar, ScrollView. It would be nice to have these controls available in Controls 2 before you deprecate Controls 1.

Regards
Helmut


_______________________________________________
Development mailing list
***@qt-project.org<mailto:***@qt-project.org>
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development

[Mitch Curtis]

TableView is in the works:

https://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/11/23/ready-qt-quick-controls-2-3/

Controls 2 has ScrollView:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-qtquick-controls2-scrollview.html

Qt.labs.calendar has MonthGrid and associated types:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-qt-labs-calendar-monthgrid.html

I'm not sure about SplitView, but I wouldn't imagine that would be too difficult to implement yourself.

From: Development [mailto:development-bounces+mitch.curtis=***@qt-project.org] On Behalf Of Helmut Mülner
Sent: Wednesday, 7 February 2018 2:07 PM
To: Frederik Gladhorn <***@qt.io>; ***@qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] Deprecation of Qt Quick Controls 1

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt Quick Controls 1.

After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that it would make sense to clarify the situation.
We see the value Controls 1 provides - more platform native styling - but it comes at a high price.

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
[...]
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce the attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix critical issues in the future.

In my application I mostly use Controls 2 but have to add some controls from Qt Quick Controls 1, e.g. TableView, SplitView, Calendar, ScrollView. It would be nice to have these controls available in Controls 2 before you deprecate Controls 1.

Regards
Helmut

[Eike Hein]

Hi,

in addition, kde.org ships a qqc2-desktop-style for Controls 2 that
implements QStyle theming (it's an improved derivative of the code
used in qqc1) and has no other KDE dependencies. It's viable to ship
with an app, and available in most distributions as a system package
as well as inside KDE's Flatpak runtime. It's not been tested much
outside of X11, Wayland and win32, though.

We've mostly transitioned to qqc2 even for desktoppy things on the
back of this style, modulo some remaining gripes with the qqc2
combobox, IIRC.

(We've had a talk about upstreaming this work but it stalled a while
back.)


Cheers,
Eike

[Andras Mantia]

Hi,

Post by Eike Hein
Hi,
in addition, kde.org ships a qqc2-desktop-style for Controls 2 that
implements QStyle theming (it's an improved derivative of the code
used in qqc1) and has no other KDE dependencies. It's viable to ship
with an app, and available in most distributions as a system package
as well as inside KDE's Flatpak runtime. It's not been tested much
outside of X11, Wayland and win32, though.

Note, that the style KDE installs can interfere with your own customizations
done for QQC2 items. I've seen this with Qt 3D Studio for example.
So there is still work to done in this area.

Andras

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Thanks for the feedback :)

Seems like this was a good point to send the mail and we became aware that
many of you are struggling with the ComboBoxes in Controls 2. Improving that
makes a lot of sense for us then.

Note that we are not going to make the module magically disappear for the
moment, it will still be part of Qt releases for the time being.
This was to check what we have left to do to allow a happy transition and
prepare and nudge everyone else to move to Controls 2.

Cheers,
Frederik

Post by Frederik Gladhorn
Hi all,
It should come as no big surprise that we are not working much on Qt Quick
Controls 1. After some discussions inside The Qt Company, we concluded that
it would make sense to clarify the situation. We see the value Controls 1
provides - more platform native styling - but it comes at a high price.
Performance is very problematic with the module and we now offer more modern
styles in Controls 2. In addition customizing the styles in Controls 2 is
possible in different ways. There is the image based style that is
especially accessible to graphical designers. There is the general styling
that has become really cheap now (thanks to the deferred execution
patches), so replacing parts of the ready-made controls does come at no
cost. Finally writing a completely custom style is entirely possible, using
the logic of Controls 2 as building blocks. In fact I see Controls 2 as
being part of Qt Quick, the part that has been missing for a long time and
that completes the story to make developing applications with Qt Quick
easy. With the recent updates to the Qt Quick Designer in Qt Creator and
additions to make Controls 2 more desktop friendly for modern applications,
I'd recommend everyone to move over.
Next to that we have picked up Qt Widgets lately again and fixes are making
their way into the module. For applications that need to look and behave
like traditional desktop applications, this is an alternative.
As you can see, the effort is currently split and we'd like to reduce the
attention to the two big areas - Widgets and Quick with Controls 2. This
means we will spend even less time on Controls 1, where we'll only fix
critical issues in the future.
As always, feedback welcome :)
Cheers,
Frederik