There was a lot of attempts, Glamorous Toolkit is exploring one alternative approach now. But the basic concept seems to be very solid. Think of the code base a

There was a lot of attempts, Glamorous Toolkit is exploring one alternative approach now. But the basic concept seems to be very solid. Think of the code base as the fractal system you want to explore. Then the browser provides several well-placed views with increasing zoom levels. It is hard to beat it. When you explore, for example, senders of a given message, you jump to another position in the fractal that conceptually looks similar. And you need to keep track to do not lose orientation. Exploring a classical source file is like moving in fractal on a fixed zoom level.