Re: TUI enhancement suggestion.

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

On 6/11/20 2:55 PM, Phi Debian via Gdb-patches wrote:
> Ok I got the big picture, the little patch I made was more a demonstrator
> than a final patch, I don't know the review process.
> 
> As soon as I can I redo one, with our remarks.
> 
> Regarding the underline going up to printf I made it on purpose as I find
> it less intrusive, underlinie space is simple, while underlining text
> (source) can render less readable again (like colors), so it is something I
> can spot quickly but not too intrusive. I use very tall xterm, spotting the
> underline in the space part is very easy easier thanjust the little >
> before the line number.. That was the reasoning... Yet I admit, when there
> is no styling it should works too so I will look again :)

Note that people are working on adding support for range stepping to gdb:

 https://sourceware.org/pipermail/gdb-patches/2020-May/168673.html

I can see that evolving such that the TUI would highlight the part of the
line that corresponds to the current statement, instead of the whole line.

Like:

      printf ("foo); ++i;
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And after a statement-step:

      printf ("foo); ++i;
                     ^^^^

So I think that it is better if both the reverse-video and the underline
highlight methods highlight the exact same characters.

Then, we could have a separate setting to pick between highlighting
the whole line including the whitespace on the left, as we do
currently:

      printf ("foo); ++i;
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

and highlighting the current line's text only, no highlight on the left
empty space.  This is similar to what e.g., Visual Studio highlights
(https://www.atlascode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/stepintospecific-original.gif),
for example:

      printf ("foo); ++i;
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

and highlighting just the left of the current line:

      printf ("foo); ++i;
^^^^^^

like you are suggesting.  

But that would be orthogonal to reverse vs underline.  I.e., we would
have a setting for "how do highlight" vs a setting for "what to highlight".

> I can't work too much on this unfortunately so it may be a while since I
> come black to this.
> 
Thanks,
Pedro Alves