You are not forced to use the designer tool, you can build the GUI with C++ directly if you need that for some reason.
There's also a stand-alone designer you can use on individual ui files. In general, there's no need to have the whole project in Qt Creator just to edit a ui file.
You can also edit the ui files in a normal text editor. They're just XML files that specify the widget hierarchy to construct. If you have a few example files to work from, they're pretty straight-forward to understand and modify. Validating your changes using designer is definitely faster than recompiling your program, but it's an option.
Re:Verdigris: Qt Without Moc
by blattimwind on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @08:38AM
(#21920897)
No, that's what uic does.
It's been a while since I've used Qt but if I recall correctly MOC also parsed and read the user interface files to generate the headers which get included in the C++ source.