Csope

C source code browser. Fork of Cscope version 15.9, with various improvements.

Because CScope is good and shall not be forgotten. While the original's maintenance seems abandoned and as far as I can tell you need a PhD in autoconf to compile the latest version, Csope is alive and well.

Table of contents

• Demo
• Features
• Interface
• Usecases
• Improvements
• Installation
  • Gentoo
  • From source
• Quick start
• Configuration

Demo

Before/After

After

Before

Features

Search for

• symbol
• global definition
• assignments to specified symbol
• functions called by specified function
• functions calling specified function
• text string
• egrep pattern
• file
• files #including specified file

...and open with your editor.

Batch change search results interactively. Save/load/pipe results.

It fully supports:

• C
• Lex
• Yacc

Partially supports:

• C++
• Java
• Specification and Description Language

Interface

            <-- Tab -->
  +--Version-----------------Case--+           +--------------------------------+
A |+--------------+---------------+|           |+------------------------------+|
| || Input Window | Result window ||           ||                              ||
| |+--------------+               ||     ?     ||                              ||
  || Mode  Window |               ||   ---->   ||            Help              ||
% ||              |               ||   <----   ||                              ||
  ||              |               ||    ...    ||                              ||
| ||              |               ||           ||                              ||
| ||              |               ||           ||                              ||
V |+--------------+---------------+|           |+------------------------------+|
  +---------------------Tool Tips--+           +--------------------------------+

Usacases

Csope shines at exploring stranger and obscure code bases due to its TUI. It sometimes gets mislabelled as a code navigation tool, but the original documentation describes it best as a "code browsing tool". Many tools can jump you to a definition or grep for patterns, but Csope is unique in that it allows for those and many other functionalities while providing you with a very comprehensible list of all results, ready to fire up your editor at just the spot. An example of its excellence is this project. The Cscope code-base used to be a total mess, fixing it would have been a lost cause, if not for Cscope itself. Well, Csope now.

Improvements/Changes

User side

• Renamed the program, because "cscope" is annoying to type
• Improved tui
• GNU Readline/History integration

To the code

• Nuked autoconf, replaced with single Makefile
• Reorganized the control flow
• Encapsulated various functionalities
• Removed macro hell used for compiling on a dead badgers
• Reduced global state hell
• Use stdbool instead of YES/NO macros
• Removed dead code
• ...and much more

Installation

Gentoo

Add my overlay and install using portage.

From source

After you made sure you have the following installed:

• ncurses
• GNU Readline
• GNU History (should come with Readline)
• Lex (or GNU Flex)
• Yacc (or GNU Bison)

Just run:

make

This will yield the executable "csope", which you are free to do whatever with.

Hint:

cp csope /usr/bin/

Quick start

Start browsing your project by running csope over it's source dir.

csope -s source/

Configuration

Readline

The readline integration should be complete -please let us know if not-, except for your prompt being used, which could easily break the TUIs display.

The rl_readline_name variable will be set to "Csope", so you may have conditional configurations in your .inputrc with the following format:

$if Csope
	# <whatever>
$endif

Colors

All can be configured sucklessly under "config/colors.h". Hopefully the comments are self evident.