No, I’m not talking about those half-baked frontends for GDB, that at best only half exposes stuff, and at worst gives you a little tab to type your GDB commands into.
No, I don’t care about 0.0000001% lost performance.
No, I don’t care about macros.
No, I don’t want to spend weeks to learn GDB inside-out, so I don’t have to search online for 15-30 minutes on an AI infested internet every time I want to use it, for each feature I’m using it for that day.
No, I don’t want to hear your anecdote about how much you use it and how fast can it be once you type 10000 wpm.
No, I don’t want to gatekeep Linux from “normies”, by making it as user-unfriendly as possible, so I can keep the Linux community a frat club for slur saying techbros.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a GUI front end, but the ignorance on display here is embarassing.
No, I don’t want to spend weeks to learn GDB inside-out, so I don’t have to search online for 15-30 minutes on an AI infested internet every time I want to use it, for each feature I’m using it for that day.
Weeks? Just type ‘help’ and you’ll get the instructions in under a millisecond. No AI slop. There aren’t even that many commands to learn lmao.
Pro tip: type ‘apropos <query>’ to search for appropriate help pages when you don’t remember the command.
Do better.
No, I don’t want to spend weeks to learn GDB inside-out, so I don’t have to search online for 15-30 minutes on an AI infested internet every time I want to use it, for each feature I’m using it for that day.
- Search “gdb cheatsheet” and bookmark it. This looks good, but you have plenty of choices. When you find one you like, you probably almost never have to go to the internet again.
- Unfortunately, you can’t avoid a search engine while programming; you’re not going to get very far. All you can do is develop your search skills to avoid the slop.
- If you’re using a statically typed language (C, C++, Rust, etc.) already, basic GDB is comparatively simple. For these languages, not knowing GDB is a bit like an electrician not knowing how to use a multimeter; it’s a matter of necessity rather than “gatekeeping”.
No, I don’t want to gatekeep Linux from “normies”, by making it as user-unfriendly as possible, so I can keep the Linux community a frat club for slur saying techbros.
For your sake, I must emphasize that insulting the people you want help from is not an effective tactic for obtaining help. There are certainly jerks in the broader Linux community, but effectively accusing anyone in this community unable to give you exactly what you want of being a “slur saying techbro” (unless I misunderstand you) is, no offense, an incredibly entitled view to have.
If you wish to make valuable use of internet forums, I would request you take heed of this: www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Anyhow, I wish you luck in your endeavors.
This is what IDEs are for
Any IDE has an interface to debugger that “half exposes stuff”. Just check if that half is enough for you.
What options have you tried that you find half-baked?
When I’m not in the mood for gdb’s CLI/TUI, I often use KDbg, Nemiver, or just good old CodeBlocks.
I’m pretty happy with the JetBrains IDEs and their debugger GUI.
Have you tried
tui ebable(if your gdb supports it) you have few layouts. Here: https://github.com/dreamportdev/Osdev-Notes/blob/master/99_Appendices/F_Debugging.md#debugging a short pargraph explaining some commands and also the Tui (text user interface )What sort of advanced usage you’re after that ‘break’, ‘list’, ‘step’ and ‘bt’ are not enough for you?
Here’s a mnemonic for you straight from Copilot:
🧠 Mnemonic: “Brave Lions Step Back”
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Break → Brave
Think of courageously “breaking” into the code at a chosen point. -
List → Lions
Lions “survey” their territory, just like list shows you the source lines. -
Step → Step
Easy one — you literally “step” through the program line by line. -
bt → Back
bt stands for “backtrace,” which shows you the call stack — looking back at how you got here.
Getting the values of given variables.
print variablename
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