Actually, it isn't _so_ hard to do; but, if you want to do that with Qt, you either have to live with your QApplication object starting up a gui in the background even when just used as command-line, or set up both a QApplication and a QCoreApplicaton in the main function, and parse through the command-line args _before_ you pass them to Qt in order to figure out which one to instantiate... Pretty annoying either way.