Re: Using gdb (windows popping up)

[jonetsu <jonetsu@teksavvy.com>]

On Sun, 09 Jun 2019 22:13:08 +0300
Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> My personal advice is to start the debugging session with "M-x
> gdb-many-windows", which will open all the UI windows, including I/O.
> I believe in this case the program's output will be inserted into the
> I/O window, and will not usurp any of your other windows.

In the previous approach I took, yesterday, I set gdb-many-windows to
non-nil and immediately experienced that control over where one wants
the buffers to be displayed becomes tense, so to speak.  A bit like
fighting with a word processor that insists that paragraphs must be
formatted in one way.

So I now prefer to drop that many windows approach and open up other
gdb windows as need arises.  This let me place buffers in a more
reasonable way.  Only setting the gdb-show-main variable to non-nil so
that a M-x gdb session starts with two buffers, source and gdb
interactive.  Then I can split windows in every which way to show any
other buffer, add a gdb input/output window before it decides on its own
to show one, etc..  This is with sr-speedbar and the lisp snippet I've
shown in this thread.

Yes, I've seen that the manual advises to uses M-x gdb in a distinct
frame.  The problem with this is that while debugging I can consult
other non-gdb buffers, sometimes for a while, before doing the next
debugger step.  Doing this on Linux switching to a different desktop is
easy, although I still prefer to have one emacs session where all the
files are, and not two of them.  The approach I'm using now seems to
support that.