Getting Started

GammaRay User Manual

What is GammaRay?

GammaRay is an introspection tool for Qt applications developed by KDAB. Leveraging the QObject introspection mechanism it allows you to observe and manipulate your application at runtime. This works both locally on your workstation and remotely on an embedded target.

Augmenting your instruction-level debugger, GammaRay allows you to work on a much higher level, with the same concepts as the frameworks you use. This is especially useful for the more complex Qt frameworks such as model/view, state machines, or scene graphs.

When trying to analyze bugs in your application, a instruction-level debugger is usually your first tool of choice, and rightfully so. Debuggers allow you to follow the program flow and allow you to inspect the state of objects or variables. When using a debugger with proper Qt integration, such as in QtCreator, it will also handle Qt's own data types correctly. However, when dealing with complex frameworks this level of detail is often too low-level. Keeping an overview in a large scene graph or following the complex interactions between models and views can quickly become a cumbersome task.

GammaRay addresses this by providing domain-specific debugging aids on a much higher level. It provides easy ways of navigating through the complex internal structures you find in some Qt frameworks, such as the QtQuick scene graphs, model/view, QTextDocument, state machines, and more. Unlike the debugger, GammaRay understands those internal structures and can present them in a meaningful way.

GammaRay is available for all major platforms and can inspect applications right from the start or attach to an already running one. It also supports remote debugging, which is especially valuable when working on embedded systems.

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Getting Started