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Where can I find a debugger with a GUI for Linux? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I use gdb myself.

I don't know exactly what you're after. From the above, I see:

"easy to use"

" the mouse is faster, not slower"

You don't specify a language, so I'm assuming you're looking for something low-level.

You don't specify an editor, so I'm assuming that you want something stand-alone, not integrated with an editor.

There are a number of packages that use gdb internally, but put some kind of visualization on it. I've used emacs's before, though I'm not particularly married to it

mainly found it interesting as a way to rapidly move up and down frames in a stack

but I'm assuming that if you want something quick to learn, you're not looking for emacs either.

Maybe seer? That'd be a stand-alone frontend on gdb with a GUI. Haven't used it myself.

EDIT: WRT gdb, the major alternative that I can think of to gdb is dbx, and that's also a CLI tool and looks dead these days. gdb is pretty dominant, so if you want something mouse-oriented, you're probably going to have some form of frontend on gdb.

There are other important debugging tools out there, stuff like valgrind, but in terms of a tool to halt and step through a program, view variables, etc, you're most-likely looking at gdb, one way or another, unless you're working in some sort of high-level language that has its own debugger. If you want a GUI interface, it's probably going to be some sort of frontend to gdb.

EDIT2: Huh. Apparently llvm has its own debugger, lldb. Haven't used it, and it's probably not what you want anyway, since it's also a CLI-based debugger. I am also sure that it has far fewer users than gdb. But just for completeness....guess you already looked at that, mentioned it in your comment.