Code documentation editor

Question

I've been looking for a code documentation editor app. I don't mean just a generation tool like doxygen, but an application that allows me to edit the documentations and change it directly at the code.

Does anyone out there know of a good editor?

Thanks!

If I understood... You want to edit the doc generation tool's output and see those changes reflected in the code? — dario_ramos, Oct 05 '11 at 21:40
Folding everything but comments will make documentation editing easy. — Pubby, Oct 05 '11 at 21:47
@dario_ramos: Yep! I want to edit the documentation from a "management application" instead of browsing the code and rewriting the documentation there. — TCS, Oct 05 '11 at 21:49
@CatPlusPlus: Well, using text editor I can change the documentation directly at the code, and that is not what I'm looking for... I'm looking for something that besides generating (like doxygen) also allows me to edit the documentation. — TCS, Oct 05 '11 at 21:51
@Pubby8: That's true, but when you have large amounts of code to document or go through, this process it very tedious! — TCS, Oct 05 '11 at 21:51
@TCS: Which would be a text editor. No, there are no editors that can edit only comments in the code. You can keep documentation outside of the code if you really want to not see it. — Cat Plus Plus, Oct 05 '11 at 21:52
TCS: I highly doubt there is an app out there which does this. But a guy who uses EMacs, knows Lisp and related esoterica could easily whip up an EMacs extension for your needs. How I envy those people... EDIT: Seeing @Jason Williams' answer, I stand corrected: if someone has done it for VS, someone should have done it for EMacs — dario_ramos, Oct 05 '11 at 21:56

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '11 at 21:56

If you're talking about Visual Studio...

I've written an add-in, AtomineerUtils Pro Documentation, which will help a lot with documentation creation & editing.

To create comments, the addin uses as much information as possible from the code element you are documenting to fil in a skeleton documentation comment for you. It tries hard to provide useful information in a readable English form (so tries to generate meaningful docs, and documents a lot of things that are not immediately "obvious" from the code itself, like exceptions a method throws)
To update comments it can sync the comment with the code - so if you add/remove/rename parameters, change the exceptions thrown, etc, it will update the comment to accurately reflect the new state of the code you're documenting.
It applies configurable word wrapping, whitespace control and block formatting to help keep the comment blocks tidy, well formed and consistent.
It supports loads of lanuguages (C++, C, C++/CLI, C#, Java, VB), Xml Documentation, Doxygen, Qt and JavaDoc documentaiton formatstyles,

If you want a documentation system that provides WYSIWYG editing of documentation without going near the source code, then I believe something more like Document!X may suit your needs better (I believe you'll have to write all the documentation yourself, but it is aimed more at authoring external documentation than providing in-code documentation)

Of course, for your language/platform/editor preference these may not be applicable, but there are other similar products around, once you get an idea of the right sort of search keywords to use, so hopefully these might give you some leads.

Tom Kerr · Answer 2 · 2011-10-05T22:02:23.150

Use a code editor and auto-fold the function bodies so you can't see them. It is the simplest way to do what you want to do. You'll have to manage version control as well, sorry to say.

The problem is that the code (and comments) are in version control and that needs to be tracked. You cannot get around it.

For what it's worth, you see a logical difference between editing the code and the comments, but you are editing the same files. Programmers see no difference between these to things and will be really confused by your terminology. I suspect they will argue with you about it incessantly too, but really its just the words you are using.

Code documentation editor

2 Answers2