Codemap

A Google Maps for source code. Codemap renders zoomable treemap-based bird's-eye views of codebases with code thumbnails and semantic syntax highlighting — zooming in progressively reveals more detail, just like a map. Uses semgrep parsers for multi-language highlighting via a GTK2/Cairo GUI.

OCaml 4.14+ (via opam >= 2.1), gcc, git, curl, pkg-config.

On Ubuntu/Debian:

apt-get install build-essential pkg-config opam curl libcairo2-dev libgtk2.0-dev

On macOS:

brew install opam pkg-config cairo gtk+

C libraries (pcre, pcre2, gmp, libev, libcurl) are installed automatically by ./configure via opam — no need to install them manually.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/aryx/codemap
cd codemap
./configure     # installs opam deps and sets up tree-sitter (run infrequently)
make            # routine build
make test       # run tests

A reference build using Ubuntu is provided:

docker build -t codemap .

To build with OCaml 5:

docker build -t codemap --build-arg OCAML_VERSION=5.2.1 .

codemap ~/my-project

This launches a GTK-based GUI that lets you visualize source code and perform code search.

See the old codemap page at Facebook for more information.

Codemap combines ideas from several software visualization projects:

• SeeSoft — Eick, Steffen, and Sumner at Bell Labs (1992). One of the earliest tools for visualizing line-oriented software statistics, mapping each line of code to a thin colored row. See also Ball and Eick's follow-up, Software Visualization in the Large (1996), which extended these ideas with multiple visual representations (line, pixel, file summary, hierarchical).
• Code Thumbnails — DeLine et al. at Microsoft Research (2006). Miniature code renderings as navigation aids, showing that the visual structure of code provides useful spatial cues even at tiny scales.
• Treemap visualization of the Linux kernel — Fekete and Plaisant at UMD HCIL (2002). The idea of using treemaps for source code layout, which codemap combines with code thumbnails and SeeSoft-style coloring.
• Google Maps — The zoomable interface that progressively reveals more detail as you zoom in. In codemap, important code is bigger (like major roads on a map), and zooming in gradually shows file content, then syntax-highlighted code.