The Class Browsers
Table of Contents
When working on a project in an object-oriented language, your emphasis when working on a project is not on the source files and their names, but on the classes and their relationships. In order to help you navigating in the space of defined classes and symbols, KDevelop includes various class browsers that visualize the class structure in different ways.
This view is shown on the left side of the main window and contains a linear list of all classes, variables and functions in your project. It is designed as a tree view. If you open a class node by clicking on it, a list with all methods and attributes of the respective class is shown.
The class view works in two different modes. By default, all symbols are grouped into “Classes”, “Structs”, “Functions”, “Variables” and “Namespaces”. In the context menu of the view, you can choose . In this mode, the namespace hierarchy is shown and the symbols grouped into the respective namespace where they are defined. This may be more useful in projects which make heavy use of (nested) namespaces. It is less useful in projects without namespaces.
You can also change the way in which class names are displayed. Normally, the names of the classes are shown, without the namespace in which they are defined. This means, you cannot immediately distinguish classes with the same name in different namespaces. If you rest for a while with the mouse over an item, the full scoped name is shown as a tooltip though. You can decide to always display the fully scoped class name by choosing from the context menu.
Clicking on a class or method in the class view brings you to its definition. You can also jump to the declaration of a method by choosing from the context menu. In the context menu for classes are also the items and . This opens dialogs where you can generate new method and variable declaration in the respective class, together with an empty implementation.
