Understand™ makes it easy to learn more about your code as you move around the editor in a source file. Information about the source file being examined is displayed by the Contextual Information Sidebar (CIS). The CIS works by tracking your location in the source code and pushing information to you about the file (with respect to the scope that you are in).
Using the CIS
The File Context area of the CIS is divided into two tabs:
The Structure Browser tab shows you the major parts of the file. In this case, Includes, Public Functions, and so forth. It also highlights where you are in the editor like a radar overview.
Next is the File Information tab:
This is an Information Browser specifically for the file you are editing. Note that how you configure the IB here doesn’t affect how the browsers in the rest of the GUI work because this instance remembers only its settings.
As you move about the file, your scope will change. The Scope Context is divided into two sections. The first, the Scope Information section, is the Information Browser for the scope you are in:
Whatever scope you are in, the Scope Context shows you the Information Browser for it.
Next up is the “Context Browser.” Its job is to tell you where you are, provide quick links to higher scopes, and provide a list of entities within a window of your cursor.
In the example above we can see that when the cursor is at line 17, we are in file
ActionItem.cpp, Class ActionItem, and Public Virtual Function “Redo.”
When we look at the code above we are able to see that “Applied” is an enumerator 2, and REQUIRE is an unknown function.