I’m currently developing on Windows mainly, but due to the end of life of Windows 10, I might switch my primary OS to Linux instead. However, despite Linux being called “developer friendly” I always preferred the tools available under Windows save for the command line shell of Linux.

My main gripes with Linux development is with the debuggers. On Windows, I have RemedyBG, a pretty good debugger with an easy to use GUI. On Linux, all I have is either GDB or LLDB, and a command line so far.

I looked into some of the “more mainstream” GUI options for Linux, all of them were just a separate tab for the same command line debugger in a text editor.

Please note that I’m the sole developer of my projects on the side of a full time job, so I don’t have 1 month to spare to learn the in and outs of GDB, which in the days of useless AI slop articles littering the internet, might be even 1.5-2 months. I have a modern PC, any performance gains from not having a well-optimized GUI is negligible. No, I don’t care about scripts. And no, unless I’m actually writing the code, the mouse is faster, not slower.

  • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
    42·
    4 months ago

    It’s fine to want a gui debugger and I want to clarify that I’m not actually trying to persuade you to use gdb! My actual advice would be vscode (or other ide) with it’s gdb/lldb integration which allows you to debug from your ide in a gui-oriented way.

    I do however think that you’re wrong about how hard it is to learn gdb. I learned to use it not that long ago and it doesn’t take “1 month”. Using gdb on a basic level is actually not particularly hard, and I can recommend this talk for anyone actually curious about learning gdb. It’s just 15 minutes, but the same speaker has done a couple of other talks on the same theme that are longer if you want to learn even more, you can probably find them in the recommended videos sidebar.

    What I actually think is the case is that learning gdb takes a bit more mental effort because it’s a different paradigm than gui debuggers, and a lot of things aren’t intuitive. If you’re prepared to be a bit uncomfortable and lost for an afternoon, and maybe even flip through the official document for a bit you can be “good enough” at gdb in less than a day.

    Gdb is also more powerful than most gui-only editors, because you can do scripting in gdb. For example you can execute an arbitrary series of gdb commands when you hit a certain breakpoint which can be really useful in some circumstances. My preferred way of debugging in linux is actually to both have a gdb window that I can enter commands in so I can do more scripting stuff if I want to, and also some extra bells and whistles for viewing source code and setting breakpoints etc. I edit in vim so I use the termdebug plugin that comes bundled with vim, but use whatever exists for your editor if you don’t use vim yourself.