It's 'qmake .pro', not 'qmake.pro' so the English meaning is different. And it's enough to read about qmake a bit to know that you have to run 'qmake' for it to see any changes in your .pro (not 'your.pro' ) file. I know this is not obvious and here we sometimes remind people that you have to run qmake afterwards but if you did that in every piece of the documentation it would be treating people like idiots.