KScope 1.4.2 review

KScope is a Cscope frontend

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: Elad Lahav

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KScope is a Cscope frontend. KScope provides a source-editing environment for large C projects, such as the Linux kernel.

KScope is by no means intended to be a replacement to any of the leading Linux/KDE IDEs, such as KDevelop. First of all, it is not an Integrated Development Environment: it does not provide the usual write/compile/debug cycle supported by most IDE's. Instead, KScope is focused on source editing and analysis.

The most important difference, however, between KScope and common IDE's is that KScope is intended for use with projects written in C, i.e., in a functional-programming environment. Most IDE's specialise in object-oriented languages and are of little help to the C programmer. For example, displaying all functions in the Linux kernel as global objects in a "Classes" tree does not provide any meaningful information.

KScope, on the other hand, is built around an efficient mechanism for code-navigation, which allows the user to run queries on the code.

The types of queries KScope can run include:

Get all references to a symbol
Find the definition of a symbol
Find all functions called by or calling to a function
Find an EGrep pattern
Find all files #including some file
etc.

These queries are handled by an underlying Cscope process. KScope simply serves as a front-end to this process, feeding it with queries, and parsing its output into result lists. The items in those lists can later be selected to open an editor at the matching line.

Here are some key features of "KScope":
Multiple editor windows (using your favourite KDE editor)
Project management
Front-end to most Cscope queries
Tag list for every open editor
Call-tree window
Session management, including saving and restoring queries
Works with externally-built cscope.out files