1.9 KiB
| title | date | draft | tags | series | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Obscure Qt: GDB pretty printers | 2023-05-02 | false |
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Edit: This was written before my projects were switched to Qt6, and I'm not aware of a Qt6 pretty printer solution (if you do, let me know in a comment below.) If you're using CLion, check out the Qt6 pretty printer plugin.
Outside of Qt Creator, GDB has a hard time understanding Qt times and you'll regularly get garbage or unusable debugging output.
Luckily, GDB has a system where you can use Python scripts to print information from custom types1. The printers we're using is Ezike Ebuka's GDB_Printers. First clone the repository, and extract it somewhere where you won't accidentally delete it. Here I copy it into my Development folder:
$ cd ~/Development
$ git clone git@invent.kde.org:ebuka/gdb_printers.git
Then edit your ~/.gdbinit file and add this to it (or create it if you haven't already):
python
import sys
# change the path below to the correct path
sys.path.append('/home/josh/Development/gdb_printers')
from printers import register_qt_printers
register_qt_printers(None)
end
set print pretty on
Now if you run GDB again, you'll get pretty prints for a lot of Qt types! This includes QString, QVector, and of course QList:
If you want a full list of supported types, take a look in qtprinters.py.
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Just make sure your GDB has been compiled with Python support, or else this won't work. ↩︎