[anjuta-devel] User experience of the debug manager

[Nancí de Brito Bonfim <nancibonfim gmail com>]

Hi all,

I want to improve the user experience of the debug manager inside Anjuta. I didn't know that 3.0 is almost on UI freeze and string freeze, but there are a few things that can be done before the UI freeze (mainly fixing bugs or glitches). As I liked a lot the idea of working on making a better user experience for people debugging programs inside anjuta, Seb said that some work could be left to Anjuta 3.2.

I made a list of bugs that I think I can work on:
Bug 307515 - 
      drag and drop variable symbol onto watches for simple expressions

Bug 564285 - Inspect/Evaluate window is hard to use

Bug 631139 - (textbox_watches) Display arrays in "watches" window as textbox

Bug 631156 - Add a start debugger button in the toolbar

Bug 392551 - Disassembly window has a huge scroll bar length

Bug 633491 - Show NULL if a pointer is NULL

I had another idea, that was someting like the "display" of GDB, that I can use to display the result of expressions - as function calls. I don't know if the watcher expressions should do this. But if it does, adding such _expression_ should actually be made easier and it's quite confusing.

I'm looking at the debugger of other IDEs, like Eclipse and Kdevelop and apart from the listed above, I couldn't think of anything right now, besides little usability issues. For instance, I think that by default we should be able to see the terminal output and the local variables, without having to drag and drop the locals tab.

Can you send suggestions, please?
Any thoughts on this?

Regards,

-- 
Nanci de Brito Bonfim