Appendix C - PySide6 Tools Reference
PySide6 provides a set of tools to support various aspects of Qt application development:
| Category | Tool | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Development | pyside6-project |
CLI | Build Qt Widgets Designer forms (.ui), resource files (.qrc), and QML type files (.qmltype) from a .pyproject file. |
| Widget Development | pyside6-designer |
GUI | Drag-and-drop tool for designing Widget UIs (generates .ui files). |
pyside6-uic |
CLI | Generate Python code from .ui form files. | |
pyside6-rcc |
CLI | Generate serialized data from .qrc resource files. | |
| QML Development | pyside6-qmllint |
CLI | Verify the syntactic validity of QML files. |
pyside6-qmltyperegistrar |
CLI | Read metatypes files and generate registration code for types marked with relevant macros. | |
pyside6-qmlimportscanner |
CLI | Identify QML modules imported from a project/QML files and output as JSON. | |
pyside6-qmlcachegen |
CLI | Compile QML to bytecode at compile time for bundling inside the binary. | |
pyside6-qmlsc |
CLI | Replaces pyside6-qmlcachegen. Generates C++ code in addition to bytecode. |
|
pyside6-qml |
CLI | Quick prototyping tool for QML files (invokes QQmlEngine/QQuickView). | |
pyside6-svgtoqml |
CLI | Convert SVG files to QML files. | |
| Translations | pyside6-linguist |
GUI | Tool for translating text in applications. |
pyside6-lrelease |
CLI | Create run-time translation files (.qm) for the application. | |
pyside6-lupdate |
CLI | Synchronize source code and translation files. | |
| Qt Help | pyside6-assistant |
GUI | View online documentation in Qt Help file format. |
| PySide Utilities | pyside6-genpyi |
CLI | Generate Python stubs (.pyi files) for Qt modules. |
pyside6-metaobjectdump |
CLI | Print metatype information in JSON format (for use with qmltyperegistrar). | |
| IDE Integration | Qt Python VSCode Extension | Extension | Visual Studio Code extension with project templates, debugging, build tasks, etc. |
| Deployment | pyside6-deploy |
CLI | Deploy PySide6 applications to desktop platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS). |
pyside6-android-deploy |
CLI | Deploy PySide6 applications as Android apps (aarch64, armv7a, i686, x86_64). | |
| Shader Tools | pyside6-qsb |
CLI | Generate and inspect .qsb shader files (from Qt Shader Tools). |
| Qt Quick 3D | pyside6-balsam |
CLI | Convert 3D assets (Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, etc.) to efficient runtime format. |
pyside6-balsamui |
GUI | Graphical user interface for the pyside6-balsam tool. |
All tools should be launched using the PySide wrappers (e.g. pyside6-designer, pyside6-uic), rather than the underlying Qt executables. This ensures the correct setup of paths, plugins, and Python environment integration. For example, if you installed PySide6 in a virtual environment named pyside6-env, you will find all the tools in:
pyside6-env\Scripts\on Windowspyside6-env/bin/on Linux and macOS.
While several tools are focused on Qt Quick / QML development, Qt Widgets developers will find several particularly useful, most notably pyside6-designer, along with pyside6-uic and pyside6-rcc. Additionally, tools such as pyside6-project, pyside6-linguist, and pyside6-deploy are valuable for larger or professional-grade projects.