Visual Documentation in the IDE

Question

I regularly get frustrated with overloading text in my IDE (Eclipse right now). I find that I separate my methods in large chunks of spaces, and then regret it later when I need to find something while looking at the code.

Something that I think works well is the GrepCode way of viewing the source code. Does anyone know if something like this was implemented in a code editor? More specifically, I want you to have nice, formatted, and colorful documentation (preferably folding) to help me read my code. He may even be able to embed design images.

Answer 1

"Text overload" is why a plugin like Mylyn exists.

Mylyn's task-oriented interface reduces information overload and simplifies multitasking.

Mylyn makes tasks a first-class part of the IDE, integrates advanced and offline editing for ALM tools, and monitors your programming activities to create a “task context” that focuses your workspace and automatically associates all relevant artifacts with the -hand task.
This puts the information you need at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing information overload, facilitating multitasking and facilitating the exchange of experience.

You can also add Markdown- enabled WikiText to your project (see WikiText Frequently Asked Questions and User Guide ).

Answer 2

To better manage huge amounts of code, you can review them:

• Use Eclipse Mylyn as it will hide code that you don’t work with.
• Open Windows → Preferences, enter “Folding” in the preferences dialog and check which editors should provide more default folds to hide irrelevant things from you.
• Have a look at the Java perspective of Eclipse. This is due to the old viewing of Smalltalk user interface code and is intended to make Java code easier to manage (but not edit).
• If you work a lot with your code (and remember its location instead of structure), you can find Crazy Outline view very useful. It provides an airplane layout view of your text.

If a more important aspect of your question is how to more easily see the documentation written for your code, check this out:

• Make sure the JavaDoc view and Declaraction view are open and constantly displayed to show the Javadoc and the declaration of what your cursor is pointing to. First of all, make sure that you are really providing JavaDoc comments.
• The Eclipse Code Recommenders project has advanced documentation views that mainly show data mining results for common Eclipse code. You can get an internal (commercial) version of this tool, so it will recommend code completion because different code was written in your projects.