Console output in a Qt GUI app?

Windows does not really support dual mode applications.

To see console output you need to create a console application

CONFIG += console

However, if you double click on the program to start the GUI mode version then you will get a console window appearing, which is probably not what you want. To prevent the console window appearing you have to create a GUI mode application in which case you get no output in the console.

One idea may be to create a second small application which is a console application and provides the output. This can call the second one to do the work.

Or you could put all the functionality in a DLL then create two versions of the .exe file which have very simple main functions which call into the DLL. One is for the GUI and one is for the console.

Add:

#ifdef _WIN32
if (AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS)) {
    freopen("CONOUT$", "w", stdout);
    freopen("CONOUT$", "w", stderr);
}
#endif

at the top of main(). This will enable output to the console only if the program is started in a console, and won't pop up a console window in other situations. If you want to create a console window to display messages when you run the app outside a console you can change the condition to:

if (AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS) || AllocConsole())