Source Insight is a source code editor

Source code editor

A source code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs by programmers. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment ....

 by Source Dynamics. Source Insight provides syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and...

, code navigation and customizable keyboard shortcut

Keyboard shortcut

In computing, a keyboard shortcut is a finite set of one or more keys that invoke a software or operating system operation when triggered by the user. A meaning of term "keyboard shortcut" can vary depending on software manufacturer...

s. It bills itself not just as an editor but a tool to understand a large source code base, and for this reason is called "program editor and analyzer." It is agile and lightweight providing useful features such as relation, context, and symbol windows. It also can display reference trees, class inheritance diagrams, and call trees, as it builds an internal database of symbolic information as it self parses the source. Its greatest benefit is to speedup code comprehension on an unfamiliar project.

Novel features

Source Insight provides all the features of the venerable cscope

Cscope

cscope is a console mode or text-based graphical interface that allows computer programmers or software developers to search C source code . It is often used on very large projects to find source code, functions, declarations, definitions and regular expressions given a text string. cscope is free...

 in a GUI environment along with a program editor. These C features are extended to object oriented domain and made more robust by being tolerant of the 'typedefs' or 'pragmas' of embedded processor C extensions. Further innovative features such as 'ifdef support' and conditional parsing allows view of the code with inactive code visually and thus aiding speedy comprehension. As more code is added, Source Insight automatically keeps its database updated, displaying variables in different colors depending on if they are local, global, static, function arguments, or yet undefined.

History and usage

It is a commercial software with a usual EULA. A 30-day trial version is available for programmers to try and evaluate. Like many program editors it takes some time for a user to appreciate all its useful and some unusual features. Source Insight has a loyal user-base in the software industry as many long time users find it difficult to work without it. Source Insight has been a player for 15 years but being Windows only has its visibility somewhat diminished with the rise of cross-platform development on one hand and programmer's being wedded to IDE's from their compiler vendor on the other.

Supported languages

Source Insight supports a wide variety of programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

s but primarily geared towards C/C++ and Java.