[Wintamute]

I'm looking forward to one day being shown a "visualizer" that actually gives me sane insight into the structure, instead of some wibbly-wobbly animated node graph that I have to click around and zoom in/out. These things can sometimes look pretty, but usually I'm left none the wiser about the actual structure.

[adrianbd]

Completely agree - Gource is also mentioned here and does something similar.

Probably more useful tools are CodeCity and JSCity, that go beyond the layout of the repo and get to the function level, so they are able to give potentially useful insights like coupling or complexity of classes. In any case, there's a long way to go as far as the effort of running these programs actually being worth it.

https://wettel.github.io/codecity.html

https://github.com/aserg-ufmg/JSCity

[curiousGambler]

To be fair, I don't think the point of gource is to be "useful" so much as "cool and interesting"

[markburns]

What would that look/behave like? I ask because I'm starting out on making some tooling for gaining insights into coupling and coherence in ruby, and I'm at a brainstorming phase.

E.g. automatic domain concept detection and suggested refactorings around domain concepts.

Re-organizing file systems into virtual filesystems based on multiple views/perspectives on the project, etc.

Any ideas you have would be really good timing to hear about

[akavel]

Not really regarding what, but on the how front, I remember that one guy invented what he called "hive plots", and he seems to be claiming they're some kind of a panaceum to so called "hairball" plots:

http://www.hiveplot.net/

(His (?) earlier invention of a "circular graph" seems also to have gained some traction in sciency publications - see http://circos.ca/intro/circular_approach/)

[aledalgrande]

How about an Oculus Rift app with a 3D circuit?

[skewart]

I honestly think "writing" code in 3d with VR could be incredibly effective. I'm starting to work on a project to test it out.

[Rangi42]

A treemap is a good static alternative to a literal tree of nodes. There are already programs like WinDirStat that use them to visualize file systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemap

http://windirstat.info/

[schlomok]

There is an extension for Chrome I use that does this pretty well, IMO. OctoTree : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjah...

[timqian]

This tool might solve your problem, Cause it shows the actual structure

https://github.com/timqian/js-code-structure

[adenadel]

Would rooting the tree help?