Overview - ECB - the Emacs Code Browser
Description: ECB - the Emacs Code Browser

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## 2 Overview

ECB is a global minor-mode which offers a couple of ECB-windows for browsing your sources comfortable with the mouse and the keyboard.

ECB offers some basic ECB-windows to browse your sources:

- ECB-Directories for browsing directories
- ECB-Sources for browsing source-files
- ECB-Methods for browsing the contents of a source
- ECB-History for a history for open or recently opened files

See Basic ECB-windows for a detailled description what these basic ECB-windows offer. See ECB-windows for a general introduction in the ECB-window-concept of ECB.

In addition ECB offers some add-on ECB-window for special purposes:

- ECB-Analyse for some intellisense stuff like possible completions or local variables
- ECB-Symboldef for displaying the documentation of current symbol under point

See Add-on ECB-windows for a detailled description what these add-on ECB-windows offer.

In addition to these “special” ECB-windows you have always an edit-area where you can edit your source-files. The edit-area can be divided into several edit-windows - as many as you need (see The edit-area). And at the bottom of the ECB-frame a persistent compilation-window (also called compile-window) can be displayed (optional), where all the output of Emacs-compilation (compile, grep etc.) and Emacs temp-buffers (help etc.) is shown (see Temp- and compile-buffers).

The following “screenshot” illustrates the typical layout of the ECB-frame1:

       ------------------------------------------------------------------
       |              |                                                 |
       |  Directories |                                                 |
       |              |                                                 |
       |--------------|                                                 |
       |              |                                                 |
       |  Sources     |                                                 |
       |              |                                                 |
       |--------------|                   Edit-area                     |
       |              |   (can be splitted in several edit-windows)     |
       |  Methods     |                                                 |
       |              |                                                 |
       |--------------|                                                 |
       |              |                                                 |
       |  History     |                                                 |
       |              |                                                 |
       ------------------------------------------------------------------
       |                                                                |
       |            Persistent Compilation-window (optional)            |
       |                                                                |
       ------------------------------------------------------------------

#### Footnotes

[1] This is only one example of the layouts ECB offers, see Changing the ECB-layout