gdb-dashboard VS nvim-dap

To debug, termdebug is built in to vim and supports a front end to gdb. In combination with gdb-dashboard this gives a reasonably good debugging experience

https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard, https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard/wiki

You can use the Python API to GDB to get really fancy TUIs like this: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

Try GDB Dashboard, it makes gdb much easier to use:

https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

There's also Voltron which works with both gdb and lldb (amongst others):

https://github.com/snare/voltron

I can't believe no one has mentioned `gdb-dashboard` [1] yet! I use it extensively. [2]

Beyond that, I have recently learned how to write custom pretty printers for GDB. This saves a lot of screen space. I should probably update [2] soon with those new techniques.

GDB is powerful, useful, and after getting my start in IDE debuggers, including Visual Studio, I struggle whenever I have to go back.

[1]: https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/12/my-development-environment-a...

Debugging: Learn gdb. You can use it for assembly. You can use it for C on a MCU. You can use it for Go on a Linux system. It’s ubiquitous, versatile, and worth understanding. You can pretty-print the output with something like this to help you out at first. There are 2 things you need, however: on chip debugger and a debug probe (though you don’t need an expensive one). Effectively, you talk to GDB, GDB talks to the server exposed by OCD, OCD knows the debug probe protocol, and the debug probe can use the MCU debug peripheral via SWD or JTAG to get those details.

I use gdb because I'm usually in the terminal. I don't think terminal it's any faster though. This is a nice addition to boring old terminal gdb.

I've been rocking dual Pycharm w/ Vim bindings plus a neovim setup and bounce between. The only thing preventing me from going 100% neovim is Pycharm's python debugger.

I have setup neovim-dap[0] with all the related plugins, it works for simple script but it bugs out and crashes when running our Flask web app. I rely heavily on the Pycharm debugger to step through our app.

Have you had a good experience with setting up a debugger in vim/neovim or is that not part of your workflow?

0: https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap

There are DAP extensions for both Vim (e.g. https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector) and NeoVim (https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap). I can't speak as to the experience in detail (I think I briefly played with nvim-dap a year or two ago), but I suspect that for most it will be good enough.

https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap/issues/1062 https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap/issues/737

Also, you can set up debugger integration with https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap .

You could use nvim-dap with nvim-dap-python.

I'd suggest starting with a Neovim distro that makes things work for you and as you get familiar you can transition to a more custom configuration as you see fit. If you want to do it by yourself then the most popular plugin for debugging in Neovim is nvim-dap and there is also an extension for Python to give you a more ready to go config instead of doing it yourself. You should read the docs of those 2 to see how you should customize accordingly your configuration.

(neovim only) nvim-dap

https://github.com/mfussenegger/nvim-dap + https://github.com/theHamsta/nvim-dap-virtual-text should be able to do it, I think?