vidb is a standalone visual debugger for any languages that has a Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that runs on the terminal with a text user interface (TUI).
The user interface and keyboard mapping is heavily inspired by pudb, which was my favorite Python debugger. If you are used to using pudb or vim, then vidb should feel right at home.
vidb has only been tested with debugpy but it should work with other debuggers that supports DAP as well.
- attaching to DAP running on TCP port
- launching new DAP session
- DAP initialization
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- master mode
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vidb is an a DAP client instead of integrating with bdb/pdb. This not only allow us to support debugging languages other than Python, but also the debugger can more easily take advantage of pydevd/debugpy features instead of just bdb.
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pydevd/debugpy supports debugging not just Python code, but also Django templates
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pydevd/debugpy have better support for debugging code that uses async, multithreaded, and subprocesses than bdb/pdb.
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vidb has first-class support for remote debugging since it is built on top of a remote debugging protocol (i.e. DAP), instead of pudb's remote debugging which is a hacky bolt on. This also means that vidb UI does not need to run on the same terminal as the program being debugged, so vidb does not interfere with the stdin/stdout/stderr of the debugee.
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Windows support for pudb have long been limited due to urwid, vidb is written on prompt-toolkit which has better Windows support than urwid.
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vidb plans to support a Master mode which allows vidb to act as both a DAP client and a DAP server. When in Master mode, you can have multiple vidb frontends running in multiple terminal or GUI windows being connected to the same debugging session. The vidb master takes care of relay the DAP messages to each frontend and synchronizing them into a unified view. This allows deeper integration with any IDE and/or text editor that supports built-in terminal pane, or with screen/tmux-based workflow, or with alternativev vidb frontends.
- note that vidb's DAP server mode only mostly resembles DAP, but it is not fully standard compliant DAP server since it need to support multiple simultaneous frontends. Connecting standard DAP client to vidb's DAP server port may work, but it is not guaranteed.
https://github.com/microsoft/debugpy/wiki/Debug-configuration-settings