Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux

DDD was taught to me when in University, 20 years ago, and it already felt clunky, my views are now much more moderate but Motif still feels like an eyesore.

Conversations over the years have shown me that DDD was a great inverse marketing tool, ironically pushing developers towards the embedded debugger UI in their favorite IDEs... despite DDD itself being indeed very powerful. But even "usefulness over aesthetics" has its limits!

Yeah, I remember DDD being an incredible tool back in the day, but it was clunky even when it was new (1995).

https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/manual/pdf/ddd-paper.pdf

motif does not work well with high resolution display, sadly

Motif today supportṡ TTF and for the HD issues, you can the DPI option for X11 at ~/.Xdefaults

Current DDD under the updated OpenMotif with TTF fonts can look much better than it did in the 90's and 00's, miles ahead than LessTif/former propietary Motif. It blends perfectly with EMWM where I have Liberation Sans/Mono for almost everything.

There's one DDD feature that I haven't found elsewhere: its graphical representation of a struct and its contents. You can double-click on a pointer field and then it draws whatever that field pointed to, with a nice arrow connecting the two.

I've found it a very powerful yet compact way to visualize the state of a program when debugging.

yes! this was so great in college to learn pointers and visualize linked lists

Citation needed. I use Motif programs without issues on high resolution displays.

Reminds of SmallTalk / and Lisp's - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager

There was even a story, that (at least for Common Lisp), you can start from almost blank state, but have an exception handler installed (that can continue), so as you go you live-edit and add pieces missing, or if code crashes change.

This is all good, until nowadays, where you really want to know what's deployed in production, and not just the last stuff I've live fixed.

I mean, I guess both have values tbh, but hard to pull two models like this and use... bit like - debugger or printf statements (or both!)