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.

  • tal
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    12 hours 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.