Re: [PATCH 00/16] Add styling to the gdb CLI and TUI

Tom Tromey
2019-03-04T15:01:55Z

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

Eli> . What should be the behavior wrt styling when GDB is used as a
Eli> back-end debugging engine? E.g., Emacs can act as the GUI
Eli> front-end to GDB -- should styling be turned off in that case? On
Eli> Windows, it will be urned off, because Emacs communicates with GDB
Eli> via pipes, but on Posix hosts Emacs uses pty's, so GDB will think
Eli> its stdout is a tty device, right?

Yes, it will. I think for cases like gud-gdb (where the ordinary CLI is
used) that it makes sense for Emacs to use gdb's styling. For MI, I
think there is no styling, and Emacs can do what it likes.

Eli> . I'm surprised there's no CLI support for requesting the
Eli> "inverse-video" style, although the infrastructure does support the
Eli> corresponding escape sequences. Is that on purpose?

It just didn't seem super important, but I'm not opposed if you want to
add it.

It would also be possible to add support for 24 bit color, but I didn't
do that either.

Eli> . The default foreground color used for addresses, blue, is too dark
Eli> when the terminal's background is black. Maybe we should change to
Eli> magenta, which should look OK on both dark and light backgrounds.

For me magenta is even darker. Setting the intensity to bold might be
more acceptable?

Eli> And one more issue, only tangentially related: if I put on my
Eli> ~/.gdbinit settings that customize style, older versions of GDB
Eli> complain when they start up, because they don't know about styles. Is
Eli> there any way of conditioning scripting commands on the GDB version,
Eli> or some other way of avoiding such problems?

Nothing built in, this is a longstanding issue when adding new settings
to gdb.

Tom