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Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

And today I learned about the existence of cGDB (a curses frontend for GDB, http://cgdb.github.com/ ). It seems very nice and I agree with what is said in one slide of the Valve talk:

«* gdb: debugging from 1970

* cgdb: debugging from 2000»

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HN discussion on cgdb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5492376

cgdb looks promising. I really, really liked the Turbo Debugger in the 90's. No debugger has offered me the same experience since. It was fast, the text-based windowed interface allowed efficiently jumping to assembly as well as to the source, view registers, editable hex dumps of memory, view watchpoints etc.

gdb is super-powerful but was a bit of a setback interface-wise because everything has to be done on a plain command line. And the GUI-based wrappers around it don't appeal to me much (don't know why, the ones I tried felt somewhat clunky).

I rather use DDD.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/

But then again, I am an IDE kind of guy.

I want to like DDD, but it has never been stable for me. Annoying it has a tendency to take down my Window Manager or even X.

If you can crash X like that, it's obviously an X bug. Imagine if I could crash your HTTP server remotely.

Seriously, DDD is pretty stable. People don't like it because it doesn't use Gtk+ or Qt. And the people who use it even if it looks ugly aren't the kind of people who would talk about it, they just use it.

Eclipse on Linux has great C programming support including interactive debugging using the CDT (C development toolkit) plugin. I used it to interactively debug operating system code running in a virtual machine on my Linux box recently and it worked great.

You might be interested in the Eclispe Linux Tools project[0], which integrates a lot of popular Linux profiling and debugging tools with Eclipse.

[0]http://www.eclipse.org/linuxtools/

There's also gdbtui which is built-in (gdb -tui or "layout next" when in a gdb session) and not too bad to at least view the code and type commands at the same time.

And in the case you don't have cgdb around there's gdb --tui (sometimes invoked by running gdbtui as well), which at least beats plain gdb imo.

You can switch to this mode at any time with either the ^x-a shortcut or the command "layout src" on the gdb prompt.

which is funny, because I long for plain gdb on Windows - not that gdb is so great, but on Windows if you want command oriented and thus scriptable, you're stuck with WinDbg, which is not as smart as gdb and has much worse syntax.

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