Sunday, January 6, 2008

info reg, for a ducat, info reg!

Back in my childhood I was severely traumatized by debugging experience with Turbo Debugger 1.0. I mean, it was so nice, so perfect tool that I barely can use any other debugger with comfort since that. That's why I usually shrug on pushing different kind of "developer GUIs" - if it's good, it can be only worse on the large scale, as you won't be able to use more mediocre tools after that ;-).

GDB is one of the worst debugger UIs in this respect - debugging oftentimes requires thousands of repetitive simple actions, and if for step in/step over you need more then one keypress and need to press anything at all just to see the code/registers, it is a great chore. Nonetheless, having accepted that it's the baseline we have everywhere, and noone (including me) could write a decent frontend for it, I humbly condition me to use it, the same way as I did long ago for vi. And that's why I write - I still can't remember a command to dump registers. Maybe it's "show registers"? Or "dump registers"? Maybe "print registers" or - crazy - "data registers"? No, it's "info registers"! Whoa!

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