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Asked: 2026-06-01T21:07:38+00:00

I’ve been working on some C++ code that some of the other developers I

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I’ve been working on some C++ code that some of the other developers I work with will use. A lot of the developers here are MS based (they use Visual Studio as their main IDE) we also have a lot of developers who use other IDE’s as well for different projects (like Eclipse and Qt, even some C++ Mac development with XCode).

The code I have are generic library functions that are cross platform compatible, so it will be used by different developers on different platforms/IDE’s. Which brings me to my question: is there a compatible Doxygen comment ‘style’ that can be ‘understood’ and used with the code completion ability by most popular IDE’s (VS, Eclipse, Qt, Netbeans, XCode)?
Something like VS’s IntelliSence where when you use your scope resultion a description pops up for that item.

If there is not a ‘compatible’ way, are there any plugins that can be used for all IDE’s that would allow for this ability, or would I have to write my own? Googling has lead me to many dead ends (possibly because I may not be inputing my question into correct search terms), and writing my own plugins is an option, though I’d prefer a ‘compatible’ style or existing plugin if possible to save time.

Thanks in advance!

Edit 1: I should mention that I am requesting Doxygen style commenting becuase it is the documenting tool we use to build out some of our documentation thus all comments in any code we make must be Doxygen style (not sure why this issue never came up before here, haha)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    So I have been struggling with this question for awhile now. In the past I have used several different software suites for development, with each having its own quirks in regards to using the documentation to drive some of the more fancy features. After working on a project in C# (and Visual Studio 2010) I have come to realize that the XML commenting seems to work the best for me.

    I personally believe that this is a failure in most of the IDE applications themselves, for example, it seems that Visual Studio really only supports XML commenting for C# applications to feed features such as Intellisense, and the less fancy syntax highlighting. I have found that there is a commercial plugin available to “enable” this feature in Visual Studio, but why should I pay for something that just has not been enabled?

    But I have diverged from your original question. When I was first researching this it seemed that Apple themselves must use Doxygen as they seem to use this standard for highlighting code already. With that said, here are some other resources to get the same functionality in other applications:

    • Atomineer Pro Documentation seems to be the tool for the job in regards to Visual Studio although I have not personally used it. It seems relatively simple to use.
    • Eclox seems to be a front-end plugin for Eclipse that actually uses Doxygen. But from what I remember you should be able to tweak the IDE itself in the C++ settings in regards to syntax highlighting.
    • Doxymacs maintains a symbol table inside of Emacs for some quick searching abilities.
    • It seems that on the Vim project page there’s a script that handles this for that editor as well, it is called DoxygenToolkit.

    I absolutely feel your pain. There’s something warm and toasty about having a nightly crontab generate cleanly documented markup that is easily searchable. I have only recently been on a warpath for finding the best mechanism available for achieving this cross-platform. From what I’ve gathered most development environments support extensions of sorts, and since Doxygen is basically the “gold standard” there’s usually one way or another to shoehorn support in if it doesn’t exist out of the box.

    If you’re interested Doxygen actually supports the C# XML comments out of the box, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to get it working in Xcode, and I’m not well versed enough in AppleScript to hack it together. But by all means please update if you do!

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