You can find the locator in the bottom left of the Qt Creator window.
To activate the locator:
To edit the currently open project's main.cpp file using the locator:
The main.cpp file opens in the editor.
To move directly to a particular line in the document when you open the document, append a plus sign (+) or a colon (:) to the file name in the locator. For example, to open main.cpp to line 41, enter: main.cpp:41.
If the path to a file is very long, it might not fit into the locator window. To view the full path, press Alt when the filename is selected.
It is also possible to enter only a part of a search string. As you type, the locator shows the occurrences of that string regardless of where in the name of an component it appears.
To narrow down the search results, you can use the following wildcard characters:
The locator enables you to browse not only files, but any items defined by locator filters. By default, the locator contains filters for:
To use a specific locator filter, type the assigned prefix followed by Space. The prefix is usually a single character. Then type the search string (typically, a filename or class name) or the command to execute.
For example, to locate symbols matching QDataStream:
The locator lists the results.
By default, the following filters are enabled and you do not need to use their prefixes explicitly:
If the default filters do not match your use case, you can check whether you can change them. For all filters, you can change the filter prefix and restrict the search to items that match the filter.
To configure a locator filter:
You can use the Web Search (r) locator filter to perform web searches. URLs and search commands for Bing, Google, Yahoo! Search, cplusplus.com, and Wikipedia are configured by default.
To find out the format of the search command to use for your favorite web search engine, perform a search in your browser and copy the resulting URL to the locator filter configuration. Replace the search term with the variable %1.
To add URLs and search commands to the list:
To quickly access files not directly mentioned in your project, you can create your own locator filters. That way you can locate files in a directory structure you have defined.
To create a locator filter:
To show only results matching this filter, select Limit to prefix.
The locator searches the files matching your file pattern in the directories you have selected and caches that information. The cache for all default filters is updated as you write your code. By default, Qt Creator updates the filters created by you once an hour.
To update the cached information manually, select Options > Refresh in the locator.
To set a new cache update time: