For me, the must-have feathers of a source browsing tool should be:

1. Syntax highlighting
2. Friendly user interface
3. Identifier and function search

If you are a Windows user, you might have heard about Source Insight, which is a non-free software. I haven’t used it, so I am not going to comment it.

For Linux user, the first tool I want to mention is Source Navigator. It is developed and supported by Red hat. It supports C, C++, Java, Tcl, FORTRAN and COBOL. It’s very powerful. But if you just want to browse sources, I don’t recommend you to use it. Since it GUI is developed in Tcl, an ancient programming language, the user interface is not very friendly. I bet you don’t like it.

Another wonderful software is Doxygen. Although it aims to generate documents various programming languages, including C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D, you can treat it as a source browsing tool. It can generate documents in HTML format. So you can read them via Firefox. If the source code is well commented following JavaDoc’s style, a beautiful documents describing classes, variables, functions could be generated. If the source code is not commented in JavaDoc’s style, the documents could also be generated, but it just have source codes, without these detailed description about classes, variables, and functions. Doxygen can also generate class-graphs, call-graphs and other similar graphs in UML style, which will help you understand the source.

The disadvantage of Doxygen is that its search result is somehow coarse-grained. It cannot distinguish variables from functions in search result. And it cannot differentiate definition, declaration and reference. So, if you are dealing with a huge project, you may find it uncomfortable to read source generated by Doxygen.

The ultimate tool, in my view, is LXR, which stand for Linux Corss Referencer. Specially, it may be the best choice for you to read Linux source code. Although, namely, LXR aim for Linux source code, it suitable for other projects written in C/C++, COBOL, Java, Perl. It is a web based tool and you can read the source code via Firefox. It uses a database to management cross references. So the search result is very accurate. And it can differentiate definition, declaration and reference.

LXR is famous for its difficulty on setup and configuration. And its user interface cannot be called “beautiful”. Luckily, the next generation, LXRng (demo) is available now. LXRng has a very beautiful and friendly user interface.  Moreover, setup and configuration for LXRng is much simpler than LXR. However, it seems that LXRng currently only support C language. If you need it for C++, you need a slight hack:

Locate to your LXRng’s installation directory, then open this file:

lib/LXRng/Lang/C.pm

Find the following code from this file:

sub pathexp {
    return qr/.[ch]$/;
}

And change it into:

sub pathexp {
    return qr/.[ch]$|.cpp$/;
}

Then LXRng should support the C++ files.

Doxygen and LXRng could satisfy most of your requirement. Maybe reading source from Firefox is strange and unfamiliar to you, but I think you will going to like it if you just have a try. If you have no idea about how to use them, just go to their websites, where you can find plenty of documents and toturials.

Originally, each part had its own theme. It’s hard to acces other parts directly from one part. For example, there are no links from my blog or wiki to my homepage. I decided to change this. Eventually, the goal is achieved.

The theme of my blog is blue-pix. I like it for its briefness. The first thing I did is to port this theme on my home page. This work is pretty simple. I only changed the tags of the CSS file. Then, I modified the blog’s theme, added a link to homepage. The themes of homepage and blog was unified.

Next thing is my wiki. I have no idea about how to create template on dokuwiki at the beginning. When I refered to this link, I started my work. I did a lot of change on CSS and PHP files. Finally, my own template of dokuwiki was created. Now the themes of the whole site is unified, except for the photo gallery.

For the blog’s theme, blue-pix, I also did lots of modification. The originally version did not support widget, and it did not support Google Analytics and other things. It also did not support thread comments. Now, it works fine. If you are interested in this theme, just feel free to contact me.

I am not an expert on PHP, CSS, and HTML. However, I like hacking. All the problems are solved with the help of Google. I believe one sentence–don’t learn to hack, just hack to learn.

———–

Supplement:

Just now, I finished the modification of my photo gallery. Now, everything in my site are following the same theme!

First, I will show you the screen shot The screen of vim is divide into two sub windows, the top one can display the code and the bottom one shows the variable you want to watch. Well, this can be changed by you, you can split the window any way you like. You can use C-B to make a break, and press R to run your program, and press S to step, and C-J to add the variable you want to watch. You can download clewn here:

http://clewn.sourceforge.net/

How to install: first of all, you should have your gvim installed,

sudo apt-get install vim-gnome

as well as gdb And then download the source file of clewn; note here, not vimgdb. And extract the file, then use your terminal to enter the clewn folder

./configure make sudo make install

Note here, may be some one will be suffered from the dependency problem during their installing. If your machine tell you that you need readline, then install libreadline5-dev

sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev

And then, copy some files to ~/.vim you can refer my folder:

cp /usr/local/share/vim/vimfiles/clewn.vim ~/.vim/plugin/

cp /usr/local/share/vim/vimfiles/doc/clewn.txt ~/.vim/doc/

cp /usr/local/share/vim/vimfiles/macros/clewn_mappings.vim ~/.vim/macros/

cp /usr/local/share/vim/vimfiles/syntax/gdbvar.vim ~/.vim/syntax/

Then, every thing is done. You can write a small program to test.

#include 

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  int i;
  int s;
  s = 0;
  for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
    s = s + 1;
  }
}

Save it as test.c , for example. And then,

gcc -g -o test test.c

If everything is right during compiling, then

clewn -va test.c

Then, gdb is opened on your terminal, and your gvim is opened at the same time Cool down now; input the following on your terminal(gdb):

file test

Now, you can debug your program on gvim. For example, you can click the line you want to set break point. And then press CTRL+B, then, break point is set. SHIFT+r（that is capital R）It will run and stop at your break point SHIFT+s（that is capital S）It will step And watch your variable, input following on gvim

:split

Then the window will be split, and then click the variable you want to watch, and press C+J, then you can see the variable appears in another window. To do this, you also can input the following on your terminal(gdb)

createvar yourvar

“youvar” represents the variable you want to watch. Following is the default shortcuts

List of default key mappings:

        CTRL-Z  send an interrupt to GDB and the program it is running
        B       info breakpoints
        L       info locals
        A       info args
        S       step
        I       stepi
        CTRL-N  next: next source line, skipping all function calls
        X       nexti
        F       finish
        R       run
        Q       quit
        C       continue
        W       where
        CTRL-U  up: go up one frame
        CTRL-D  down: go down one frame

cursor position: ~
        CTRL-B  set a breakpoint on the line where the cursor is located
        CTRL-E  clear all breakpoints on the line where the cursor is located

mouse pointer position: ~
        CTRL-P  print the value of the variable defined by the mouse pointer
                position
        CTRL-X  print the value that is referenced by the address whose
                value is that of the variable defined by the mouse pointer
                position
        CTRL-K  set a breakpoint at assembly address shown by mouse position
        CTRL-H  clear a breakpoint at assembly address shown by mouse position
        CTRL-J  add the selected variable at mouse position to the watched
                variables window

This is referred the official document, which is available here

http://clewn.sourceforge.net/doc.html

Hope this will help you somewhat. If you have some new or better idea, please contact me. chunhao86@gmail.com Thanks