[lug] source code browsing implementations

[Chris Riddoch]

On 2012-01-08, karl horlen <horlenkarl at yahoo.com> wrote:
> i'm looking for recommendations for source code browsers.

This is a subject I'm rather interested in - I suspect a lot of us
spend more time reading code than writing it... I've looked at some of
the options out there for helping organize and studying source code.

While the scope is a little larger than simply browsing source code,
I'm rather impressed with Review Board (http://www.reviewboard.org/)
and similar web-based tools.  It's a relatively old article, but it
was mentioned once on LWN (http://lwn.net/Articles/265239/) and the
article refers to a number of similar projects.  I figure if a project
mentioned there is still active now, it's probably something you can
rely on.

There's also gerrit (http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/) and a few
easily googled commercial options when you use the phrase "code
review".

Another option that I was just thinking about yesterday, in fact... I
was given an e-ink Nook for christmas, and reading off that is much
easier on the eyes than a standard laptop screen after a long period
of time.  The Nook allows for making annotations alongside the text
(though I haven't gotten around to seeing if they're extractable yet.
As it is, there's a good chance I'll be rooting it soon to put
possibly-better PDF viewers for android on it.)  So you could use the
'highlight' program (http://www.andre-simon.de/) to create HTML from
your source code, and probably make epub files from that which you
could use on such a reader.

Alternatively, there's always paper.  I've used a2ps in the past to
nicely format source code for printing, I'm sure there's other tools
like that, too.

As a little tangent, I recommend the book "Code Reading" by Diomidis
Spinellis, even though it's probably not on the shelf of most-recent
computer books.  The book's website is
http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/

I might be answering a slightly different question than the one you
asked, I'm not sure, but I'd appreciate it if you could let us know
what you find most useful.

-- 
Chris Riddoch
http://www.syntacticsugar.org/