Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/01/11/07:35:50
On 9 Jan 1998, Myknees wrote:
> So, many months later, is anyone working on such a project? And (I
> am thinking of Eli Zaretskii specifically) I have heard of people
> who use emacs for djgpp...do all those people learn to use the
> standalone gdb debugger?
This is on my todo list, but I haven't done anything yet except
thinking about how to implement the necessary functionality.
Obviously, I cannot do everything myself, so please feel free to get
this project under way on your own.
And yes, I use gdb, but it's no big deal for me since I use it for a
long time now. I suggest you read the manual and get an idea about
its power. Gdb is an exceptional debugger (IMHO), and since it is
highly portable, your efforts to learn to use its many features is an
investment in the future.
Btw, the Emacs interface to gdb (and other debuggers) doesn't free you
from the need to know the gdb commands, since most of the commands
still have to be typed as if you were working from the command line.
Only the most frequently-used commands are mapped to Emacs keys. The
bulk of the interface makes sure that Emacs shows you the source
line(s) which gdb is debugging, but it doesn't do much about the user
interaction.
> If this is the case, and people are using emacs and then exitting to use gdb,
> is that worth it?
I don't exit Emacs, I shell to DOS to debug, and then type "exit [Enter]"
to return to Emacs. This is faster, especially when you have a lot of
files loaded, since you don't lose the display setup, the history of
the commands, etc.
> After peeking at the man for gdb, it looks
> "un-convenient," but maybe with experience that could change. I'm
> just looking for opinions. Obviously there is no right answer here.
Well, here's my opinion. I have never understood what's so great or
``convenient'' about the GUI front end in debuggers. Is it so much
easier to press F7 rather than s or F8 instead of n? I don't think
so. And for more complicated things you have to set so many different
parameters that the GUI doesn't help much anyway.
OTOH, gdb has several powerful features, such as auto-completion (type
a few letters of the command name, then press TAB) and user-definable
commands, which many other debuggers lack. The combined power of
these features is very impressive, but I don't think you can make
their usage esier via a GUI, because in my experience, a GUI is not
suited well to complicated tasks.
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