RoPod/Tutorials/Setup IDE
Using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) makes it easier to find your way in the ROS cpp code. All functions, variables, classes, etc. will be highlighted and can be be easily tracked.
From the suggestions in http://wiki.ros.org/IDEs, we recommend to use KDevelop. Install it first:
sudo apt-get install kdevelop
To set it up and open a ROS project, either a whole catkin workspace or a package, follow carefully the instructions here http://wiki.ros.org/IDEs#kDevelop.
It is recommended to also install doxygen http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/. You can use doxygen comment style to later automatically generate documentation for your source code. Moreover doxygen can generate class dependency graphs that will help you in understanding existing source code. Follow the documentation in the website to learn how to generate documentation, the use of the doxywizard command is especially recommended.
doxywizard
and follow the instructions.