A code browser is an editor, sometimes with

folding Fold, folding or foldable may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Fold'' (album), the debut release by Australian rock band Epicure * Fold (poker), in the game of poker, to discard one's hand and forfeit interest in the current pot *Abov ...

or other advanced layout capabilities, designed to structure

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

or, by extension, other kinds of

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

. Since it is typically aware of the syntax (and, to some extent, the semantics) of the text it is displaying, it is able to use various techniques to make navigation and cross-referencing faster and easier; this allows it to present a good overview of the code of large projects. An editor of this type is positioned between a traditional text editor, a Smalltalk

class browser {{Unreferenced, date=July 2010 A class browser is a feature of an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows the programmer to browse, navigate, or visualize the structure of object-oriented programming code. History Most modern clas ...

and a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

such as Mozilla. It displays a structured text file (marker-based folding) hierarchically, sometimes using multiple panes. A code browser usually supports

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

for major languages, and frequently allows users to define highlighting schemes for other files relevant to their activities; in some cases it may also integrate the output of other programs such as

gdb The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Go, and partially others. History GDB was first written by ...

. Although code browsers were initially designed to edit programs, they can also be used for different tasks such as plain text outlining or helping to understand existing source code.

References

Tibleiz ReviewCoding & Development
Source code Text editor features {{Compu-prog-stub