The GDB GUI : About us

Insight is a graphical user interface to GDB, the GNU Debugger written in Tcl/Tk by people working at Red Hat, Inc. and Cygnus Solutions. We've been developing this debugger GUI since 1994. It has turned into a mature interface that is able to give you access to much of GDB's power.

This project is in its second generation. The original GUI was released back in 1996 (called "gdbtk"), and has undergone a complete transformation since then.

Insight is being released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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As GUI as you wanna be!

You can't please all of the people all of the time.

Oh wait, yes you can. Insight is still gdb (witness the fact that to start it up, you just type: gdb.) However, you can also run it with the -nw command line option (no windows), and you'll get a GDB just like the one you know and love (though it won't hide that game of NetHack you are playing nearly as well as the Many-Windowed Insight GUI will...) Finally, in the GUI, you can pop open a Console window, and interact with GDB just as you normally would, while still enjoying the comforts of a Graphical debugger.

Some folks will never want to use a GUI to their debugger, some will hate to use any debugger without a GUI. Insight pleases everyone, even your grandmother who likes to hack a little when no one is looking. Insight brings world peace. Insight makes your food taste better.

The real advantage of using the Insight GUI (or any real debugger GUI) is that you can see multiple displays simultaneously. You can have a Console window to type commands, a Source window to see what code you're currently executing, a variable display to see the current contents of variables (including structures, linked lists, etc.), your program's call stack, and so on. All your displays are updated automatically as you step through your program.

Don't poo-poo a GUI just because you can click on things--give it a spin and see what you can do with it.

Who did all of this?

Insight has been in development for five years, and it has been helped along by many people at Cygnus. The original gdbtk was written in 1994 by Stu Grossman. Martin Hunt started the work on gdbtk2 aka Insight, and the most recent Insight developers have been Keith Seitz, and Jim Ingham.

Significant contributions have been made by Ian Lance Taylor, Tom Tromey, and Elena Zannoni.

Feedback / Contact Us!

Have questions, hints, comments, suggestions, vague notions of moral superiority? We want to hear all about it! Send mail to insight@sourceware.org.