Neovim for Beginners — Terminal Debugger

Debug applications using the built-in terminal debugger.

Neovim for Beginners — Terminal Debugger

In this article, we will learn how to use the built-in terminal debugging plugin to debug Rust applications with gdb and rust-gdb.

This article is part of the Neovim for Beginners series.

The Neovim configuration files can be found in this repository.

Getting Started

The terminal debugging plugin (:h terminal-debug) can be used to debug a program with gdb and view the source code in a Vim window. This is completely contained inside Vim and also works remotely over an ssh connection.

This plugin needs to be loaded explicitly using the following command.

:packadd termdebug

Alternatively, we can load the plugin when we start Neovim.

gdb

Depending on the operating system, the GNU debugger can be installed easily.

For macOS, if you encounter the following error, refer to this link to give gdb permission to control other processes.

Starting program: /x/y/foo
Unable to find Mach task port for process-id 28885: (os/kern) failure (0x5).
 (please check gdb is codesigned - see taskgated(8))

Additionally, to prevent gdb from using a shell to start the program to be debugged, we can use the following command for this inside gdb.

set startup-with-shell off

We can also put this command in a file called .gdbinit in the home directory, in which case it will be applied automatically every time we start gdb.

The GNU Debugger

rust-gdb

rust-gdb is a wrapper that loads external Python pretty-printing scripts into gdb. It is a prebuilt binary that comes with the Rust installation.

Rust GDB Debugger