5.7.6. Browsers and Editors

• The Symbol Browser can be used to gain an overview about which symbols are defined in the source code or it displays the results of queries sent from other tools such as which symbols exist, the names of which match "X".

• The Class Browser can be used to browse through the locally defined and inherited members of a class.

• The Hierarchy Browser can be used to display the class graph and to visualize queries such as "mark all classes declaring method X".

• The Retriever can be used to obtain information about where a certain symbol is used in the source code (i.e., cross reference information). The Retriever is a text search based tool. It makes it possible to extract all occurrences of strings matching the name of a symbol (or any regular expression) in a set of projects. The matches can then be further restricted with semantic filters. The Retriever provides therefore a much more powerful query facility than conventional cross referencing tools.

• Sniff's comfortable mouse driven WYSIWYG Editor provides several kinds of browsing support and it automatically highlights structurally important information such as class names, method names, and comments. Once a source file was modified it is possible to trigger its compilation from the editor and to mark the source lines where the compiler found syntax errors. The current version of Sniff does not provide an emacs interface. Because of the flood of requests we will provide emacs support with one of the next versions.