I do a lot of programming at work in Qt Creator which is a perfectly acceptable IDE,1 and up until recently we used qmake to manage the build for basically the same reason we use Qt Creator: because these are Qt projects and the native tools understand them.
But several things have happened recently2 that collectively have made us move to cmake for most projects. And that means we've bumped into a quirk of the IDE: there is a big time-cost to changing the CMakeLists.txt files. Not I hasten to add because its any slower than anything else in running cmake. It does that just fine. But after it re-configures the build, it re-scans the project to locate files that should be listed in the project tree-view. For more than thirty second in the case of my main project. And for some reason it does this as a synchronous operation: preventing you from taking any other action in the IDE.
Now, most of the time this is a non-issue: I'm working on the code not the build, so it rarely comes up and is a minor annoyance.
But if you are working on the build (as I was this afternoon), it is critical to overrule that "hit the save key-combo everytime you pause to think" reflex that makes so much sense at other times.
1 I mean, it can't refactor template code very well, but you can at least learn how it fails and know how to fix up the results.
2 Qt has deprecated qmake with Qt6, we've started using some of our code (including a underlying library) with third party projects that use cmake, and we have found that cmake is slightly better at parallelizing bigish builds resulting in slighlty but noticiably faster edit-compiler-test cycles.
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