Coreen is a code reading environment. It aims to facilitate the process of reading and understanding code. It is not an IDE, the primary goal of which is authoring code, and only secondarily supports code reading and understanding. That said, Coreen will necessarily overlap with the functionality of various IDEs.

Coreen's functionality breaks down into three areas:

• search
• navigation
• visualization

Coreen is an extremely early work-in-progress. It presently works only with Java source code (it is functionally code-agnostic under the hood but will require per-language name resolvers). It accomplishes basic code display, navigation and searching, but new functionality is being added frequently.

Here are some screenshots showing a few different views:

• Project summary
• Package summary
• Class summary
• Searching

Coreen is an application that runs on your local machine. Download the installer appropriate to your platform here:

• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Windows

Check out the Getting Started with Java documentation once you have it installed.

Coreen has a Google Group where you can ask questions, discuss code reading, suggest features, and do many other communication-related activities.

Coreen is most useful when you can use it to look up names while you're editing source code. Ideally you should be able to press a few keys while the cursor is sitting on a symbol that you want to know more about. The following are instructions for making that a reality.

Download the coreen.el file (or just check out the whole project and reference it from src/main/elisp/coreen.el), and add the following elisp to your .emacs file:

(load "path/to/coreen.el")
;; these key combinations are, of course, only suggestions
(defun coreen-java-mode-hook ()
  (define-key java-mode-map "\C-c\C-j" 'coreen-view-symbol)
  (define-key java-mode-map "\M-."     'coreen-open-symbol)
  (define-key java-mode-map "\M-/"     'pop-coreen-mark)
  (define-key java-mode-map "\M-?"     'coreen-view-symbol)
  (define-key java-mode-map "\M-["     'previous-error)
  (define-key java-mode-map "\M-]"     'next-error)
  )
(add-hook 'java-mode-hook 'coreen-java-mode-hook)

Add the following to your .vimrc file:

" this allows you to enter :c to look up the symbol under the point
command -nargs=1 -complete=tag Coreen !xdg-open http://localhost:8192/coreen/\#LIBRARY~search~<args>
nmap <leader>c :Coreen <cword><CR>

On a Mac you'll want to change xdg-open to open and on Windows you'll want to change it to start. On Linux, xdg-open should work as long as you have Gnome or KDE installed.

Contributions are welcome for instructions on how to easily call out to Coreen from other editors. Please send them to my email address below.

Coreen is a research project being conducted by Michael Bayne. Feel free to email him to let him know that this is a crazy idea (crazy good, or crazy bad), or even better, that you are interested in writing a name resolver for another language.