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An interactive G-code editing GUI.

Try it in a browser — the WebAssembly build, deployed to GitHub Pages from main by CI.

Installation

qgcoder needs libqgcodeeditor, a Qt 6 widget for editing G-code. Debian and Ubuntu have a package for it; everywhere else it has to be built from source into a prefix that CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH then points at, the way the CI workflows do it.

Linux

gh repo clone QGCoder/qgcoder && cd qgcoder
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
./build/qgcoder

or build and install a Ubuntu / Debian package as follows:

gh repo clone QGCoder/qgcoder && cd qgcoder
mk-build-deps -i -s sudo -t "apt --yes --no-install-recommends"
dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot -us -uc
sudo dpkg -i ../qgcoder*.deb
sudo apt -f install

macOS

Grab the universal .dmg from the releases page and drag qgcoder.app into Applications. It is only ad-hoc signed — there is no Developer ID certificate in CI — so the first launch needs a right-click → Open. It runs on macOS 11 (Big Sur) or newer.

Windows

CI builds with MinGW-w64: download the windows-mingw64 artifact from the latest run, unpack it and run bin/qgcoder.exe. The command pane shells out to bash, so that one pane does nothing useful there; the editor and the 3D view are fine.

In a browser (WebAssembly)

Every push to main is built and deployed by the wasm workflow, so there is normally no reason to build this yourself. To do it anyway: each Qt minor release targets one specific Emscripten version — 6.10 wants 4.0.7, and the pairing for any other release is named on Qt's Qt for WebAssembly documentation page — so activate emsdk at that version, then build both libraries with qt-cmake, which supplies the Emscripten toolchain file:

QT_WASM=~/Qt/6.10.2/wasm_singlethread  # wherever Qt for WebAssembly lives
PREFIX=$PWD/prefix                     # where libqgcodeeditor lands

git clone https://github.com/QGCoder/libqgcodeeditor
$QT_WASM/bin/qt-cmake -S libqgcodeeditor -B libqgcodeeditor/build \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$PREFIX \
    -DBUILD_STATIC_LIB=ON -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=OFF -DBUILD_DESIGNER_PLUGIN=OFF
cmake --build libqgcodeeditor/build && cmake --install libqgcodeeditor/build

gh repo clone QGCoder/qgcoder && cd qgcoder
$QT_WASM/bin/qt-cmake -B build-wasm -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH=$PREFIX
cmake --build build-wasm
cmake --install build-wasm --prefix $PWD/site

CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH rather than the usual CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH: the Emscripten toolchain sets CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_LIBRARY to ONLY, which confines find_library() to the find roots, and a prefix path is not one of them.

site/bin is then a directory a web server can be pointed straight at: qgcoder.html with the .js, the .wasm and Qt's loader files beside it. Serve it — file:// will not do, the browser refuses to fetch the .wasm.

A browser has no command line to have named a file on and no file system to keep one in, so this build opens the doc/demo.ngc sample compiled into the binary and keeps its scratch file in the one Emscripten holds in memory. Open and Save As go through the browser's own file dialogs, and the command pane — which shells out to bash — is compiled out along with the worker thread the desktop builds interpret on.

– Tested with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS - CI wasm

Overview

qgcoder is a Qt 6 application. It needs only qt6-base-dev and libqgcodeeditor-qt6-dev to build: the 3D tool-path view is a plain QOpenGLWidget driving one small shader, so libQGLViewer, GLEW and GLUT are no longer required. It draws through the subset shared by the OpenGL 3.3 core profile and OpenGL ES 3.0.

The WebAssembly build is the exception and draws the same geometry with QPainter instead. QOpenGLWidget does not work in Qt for WebAssembly: the widget renders into a WebGL context of its own, and the compositor then has to wrap that context's texture for the one it draws the window in — which WebGL, having no context sharing, cannot do, and both contexts are lost the moment it is tried. There is nothing to accelerate here but coloured line segments, so projecting them on the CPU costs little.

The RS274NGC G-code interpreter is built into qgcoder — there is no separate rs274 executable to install or point at. See rs274ngc/README.md.

When started first, the desktop builds ask for a scratch G-code filename, and optionally a tool table (leave it empty to use the built-in default), as seen in the following screenshot:

In the 3D view, drag with the left mouse button to orbit, with the right button to pan and with the middle button (or the wheel) to zoom. Double-click, Home or Space frames the whole tool path, R returns to the default viewpoint, and A and G toggle the axes and the grid.

A short YouTube video shows, how you can interact inside qgcoder.

Author

  • Jakob Flierl - koppi - main application (main.cpp, mainwin.*, settings_dlg.*, view.*, packaging) - GPL-2.0

Contributors

  • ArcEye (Mick) - ArcEye - large file handling, settings dialog and menu wiring in mainwin.* / settings_dlg.* (2016) - GPL-2.0
  • Mark Pictor - g2m G-code-to-mesh interpreter core (canonLine, canonMotion, canonMotionless, helicalMotion, linearMotion, machineStatus, nanotimer, lex_analyzer, 2010) - GPL-2.0-or-later
  • Anders Wallin - aewallin - modifications to g2m/g2m.hpp / g2m/g2m.cpp (2011) - GPL-2.0-or-later
  • Kazuyasu Hamada - modifications to g2m/g2m.hpp and the g2m/gplayer.* G-code player (2015) - GPL-2.0-or-later
  • NIST and Mark Pictor - the RS274NGC G-code interpreter vendored in rs274ngc/ (2008) - GPL-3.0-or-later