Source Code Browsing Tools?

Marco Sanvido asks: "I often look at source code (especially C, but this question is valid for other languages as well) and I have a really hard time in understanding how it works. Documentation is often missing or quite outdated, and the only way to see how the program works is to try to understand the source code. Which tools do you prefer to use for browsing and studying source code? So far I have used LXR for Linux, Eclipse for java, and CScope, but I'm not sure that these tools are the best solution." It's tempting to flood this question with answers for your IDE, but the key thing here is _browsing_, not _development_. What decent, lightweight programs would work well as source code viewers?

Comments

Not browsing, source code finding is the issue

[wysiwia]

I'm amazed, even the title of this story is wrong. For browsing any tool who can display code is sufficient. Sure tools which can syntax highlight or have name reference lookup are better but the real issue is to find the source code first hand.

Whenever I search for a solution I first go to http://koders.com/ but their index seems a little limited. Still just try once looking up "wxSingleInstanceChecker". There are others like Koders.com but I've forgotten their names. Next I try to think of a most fitting statement for code and feed it to Google (e.g. "class App: public wxApp", but beware of the white space) which at least returns some hints which project might have source code available. Yet the free text search isn't very suited for searching code since it produces too much wrong results.

When I've found a project which might have fitting code I either look into their LXR if it's available or simply download the source tarbal and use a decent editor (e.g. http://freshmeat.net/projects/wyoeditor/).

It's said that none of the current CVS web tools are searchable, nor that Google is able to restrict results to CVS pages, else it would be much easier to search for source code.

O. Wyss