Qt UI file sorter

When loading, editing and saving a Qt UI file with Qt Designer, Qt designer will not respect the order of xml items. Instead the order will change seemingly at random. This behavior is unfriendly to version control.

This simple python script attempts to restore the order in order to have a clean diff when committing the changes.

Currently the tool supports:

• Sort the children of QGridLayout by row-column order
• Remove stdset="0" attributes
• Remove native="true" attributes

Problem is discussed further here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65463217/qt-ui-file-xml-order-qgridlayout-row-order-leads-to-large-commit-differences/65778726?noredirect=1#comment116324573_65778726

Installation:

git clone [email protected]:davidosterberg/Qt-UI-file-sorter.git

Usage:

sort_ui [-h] [-o outfile] [--no-sort-qgridlayout] [--no-remove-stdset] [--no-remove-native] filename

Example 1:

sort_ui examples/TaskHoleParameters.ui

will sort the supplied unsorted ui file overwriting the original.

Example 2:

To sort all ui files in a project recursively

find . -type f -name "*.ui" -print | xargs sort_ui --no-remove-stdset --no-remove-native

Installation/Usage on Windows

1. Clone the repo

git clone [email protected]:davidosterberg/Qt-UI-file-sorter.git

2. Create the file sort_ui.bat in the folder, with this content

set PATH=C:\Projects\FreeCADLibs_12.1.3_x64_VC15\bin;%PATH%

cd C:\Projects\sort_ui
python.exe sort_ui "%~f1"

3. Adjust the paths to your setup.
4. The lxml module can be fetched from here: https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#lxml whl is a compressed format (probably zip) that can be opened with 7-zip. Drag and drop the content to the directory of sort_ui.bat

Now just drag and drop a ui file to the sort_ui.bat file.