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Monday, July 21, 2008

Source code browsing tool

In UNIX environment there is the famous “cscope”, to browse the source code and make changes. Using cscope it is easy to browse/edit the source code, cross reference all the functions calling a function, including a file etc.

In windows, I was using notepad++’s find files options browse C source code. Today I decided to find an open source full fledged source navigator for windows.

I started with notepad++ plugin – “Function List”. But it is just not enough for a project source browsing. Google searches gave me cscope port of windows(http://cscope.sourceforge.net/). However I wanted more – the GUI. With few more searches I found Source Navigator - http://sourcenav.sourceforge.net/

Soucrce Navigator is very useful, I just added my project and it give me full list of symbols. Editing a function is just clicking it. Since I am using notepad++ for editing anything, I changed the editor preference to notepad++. To do go to Source Navigator->File menu->Project Preference->Edit-> External editor and give the following line
"C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" -n%l


Now I can easily browse the source code in Source Navigator and edit it in Notepad++ with few keystrokes.

2 comments:

Josh Arenson said...

Thanks for this.

Ruben said...

If you like cscope, you may want to try CodeQuery, a tool built on top of both cscope and ctags:
https://github.com/ruben2020/codequery