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Comment by arunc | Hacker News Reader

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arunc·

GDB text user interface [1] is much easier and productive to use than this albeit it doesn't offer syntax highlighting.

[1] https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/gdb/html_chapter/gdb_19....

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GDB 8.3, just released [1], introduced support for syntax highlighting.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-05/msg00007...

I find GNU Emacs M-x gdb pretty productive when used with M-x gdb-many-windows. Especially, I like the way I can browse and look deep the local variables (middle-click [or Shift-Enter] on any pointer variables in "local" window, which opens speedbar with its contents), along with other common features.

From my experience cgdb (https://cgdb.github.io/) is the more stable TUI interface.

With GDB you can use all of the glory that is printf, inside of the termal. This means terminal control codes, that you can use to change colors on the screen for syntax highlighting.

peda is an excellent project that uses this to great success: https://github.com/longld/peda

All of that being said... it's really not very practical. (: But, it CAN be done, and it is done, I'm just glad I'm not the person doing it.

The keybindings are for to emacs like for me to consider it easy to use :)

It is much more powerful and productive though, reverse debugging and scripting offer far more power than just stepping through code in an IDE. It's probably possible to do that through vim, but at some point your basically using the CLI interface and have to learn GDB anyway.

So, several years ago, I found that using the TUI environment increased the likelihood that gdb would crash (typically also in conjunction with the disassembly view). I do not know if it has become more stable in recent years; has anyone else noticed this more recently, or has it become more stable?

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