Comment by f1shy
3 months ago
I use Emacs. It does need some fine tuning, tree-sitter installation, etc. but after that, I cannot understand colleges using VS. I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.
Some colleges have switched from years VS to Emacs and after a week won’t look back.
> I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs.
Guys, please. I am all for FOSS, but such delusions can only be harmful, for they prevent from actually improving stuff.
Did you sir ever use debugger in your life?
Almost every day. I use gdb both for JTAG targets in embedded systems, as in a programs running in my host.
Emacs has a front end for gdb. Some colleges use other front ends.
What I’m preventing to improve, in your opinion?
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
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To improve GDB and its frontends so they match VC++ debugger experience.
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What is so superior about Visual Studios debugging experience that you're sure it can't be replicated anywhere else? I've never used it.
The UI is great but could be matched by other tools, what's superior are advanced features like the remote debugger.
Most of my colleagues never use a debugger even though they use vscode. I (the weird emacs user) actually had to show them how to use one, but they still don't.
Are they actually programmers? Or just people who pretend to know how to code? How can you be a professional programmer and not use a debugger? Also not sure what VS Code has to do with it, it's not Visual Studio proper.
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