Hacker News Reader

I have definitely gotten to the point of "Fine, I'll just use IDA Pro then".

Of course, visual debuggers are another story entirely, but I'm not really thrilled with them either. For example I don't recall there being a good way to say "Decode the address at rax as a WNDCLASSA" or something like that in IDA. (I'm crossing my fingers for a Cunningham's Law here.)

View on HN

You can jump to the address and then declare the data as a struct.

It is annoying though that you can't make the register display show a particular type, it only shows unsigned hex integers. If I'm tracking a 32-bit float it is very frustrating, it won't even show you alternate representations on hover...

For as good and expensive as IDA is, the UX sure is lacking.

Man, I can not believe it never occurred to me to do that. It's certainly what I would do when using IDA outside of debugging, but I guess it's just hard to internalize that you can do all of the same things to live memory in the debugger.

I don't recall what it was called in the menu, but it was definitely possible to assume a struct on a particular address. Muscle memory tells me the button is U, even though actual memory fails me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com