pwndbg VS gdb-dashboard

It's written for exploit development, but even for debugging a C program. It makes things a lot nicer.

https://pwndbg.re/

By far the best debugger for C is gdb+pwndbg (https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg)

There are a lot of these types of tools already in the reverse engineering community (in order of lowest chance of breaking when you throw really weird stuff at it):

GEF: https://gef.readthedocs.io/en/master/

PWNDBG: https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg

PEDA: https://github.com/longld/peda

They also come with a slew of different features to aid in RE/exploit dev, but many of them are also useful for debugging really weird issues.

GDB is great. I definitely recommend checking out watchpoints as well, a very useful tool for monitoring how a variable changes over time.

GDB also has many good plugins - pwndbg has tons of features and UI improvements over stock GDB.

https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg

I've recently started a new semester for my Master's program, and the first project for the semester involves using the GDB tool (GNU Debugger) to analyze a stack on a simple C program that contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. A couple of semesters ago, I had been given a VM pre-loaded with a more featured debugger tool called pwndbg. Pwndbg was excellent because it was easy to use and easily allowed accessed to information such as current assembly code being executed and a view of the program registers. So, going back to using GDB felt a little like stepping back into the stone age.

Pwndbg - A GDB plugin that provides a suite of utilities to hack around GDB easily.

i have peda installed on my gdb and now i am trying to install pwndbg with git clone https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg cd pwndbg ./setup.sh

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.