When comparing QtCreator/Qt vs GNU Diffutils (diff), the Slant community recommends GNU Diffutils (diff) for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux diff tools?” GNU Diffutils (diff) is ranked 10th while QtCreator/Qt is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose GNU Diffutils (diff) is:
Great for creating patch files, using with other *nix utilities (for example, colordiff). Does not require a GUI.
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Pros
Pro Visual GUI designer
QtCreator has QtDesigner component, allowing you to design a GUI in visual mode instead of raw code.
Pro Ready-made classes for most used tasks in desktop app development
Launching external applications, getting environment variables, putting tasks to separate threads, offscreen painting, transparent loading of most used image formats, even such helpers as opening files in default application configured in OS, cross-platform (!).
Pro Cross platform
Qt supports most popular platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. This allows developers to easily port applications to different platforms.
Pro Command Line Interface makes it easy to use for people who work a lot in the terminal
Great for creating patch files, using with other *nix utilities (for example, colordiff). Does not require a GUI.
Pro Creates patches
These patches can be used to apply the differences to the same source file at a different storage location (different folder, different machine).
Pro Multiple formats
The difference can be output in formats known as normal, unified, ed, rcs, and side-by-side.
Pro Compares entiry directory trees
Two directory trees can be compared file by file recursively. All differences are output concisely.
Cons
Con Vendor lock on QtCreator
It's not simple at all to use Qt in a different IDE, and you'll lose QtDesigner.