[CoolGuySteve]

That kind of gets to the heart of what I’m saying. These graphical tools are great as long as they do what you need. But they are less composable and customizable than an expression parser.

Like in the article he mentions not being able to see custom data types, but my .gdbinit has a few pretty printers in it for exactly that purpose.

And when you do get something customized in MSVC like a specific PGO build or something, it tends to be tightly coupled to that project. It’s less easy to cut and paste into another project since the primary interface is really a dozen little text fields modifying XML somewhere.

[pjmlp]

VS supports displaying custom types.

Regarding gdb, during the mid-90's I got by calling it from XEmacs, until I discovered DDD.

I got spoiled with Borland debuggers, typing n, s, l, p all the time and drawing structures on paper gets tiring after a while.

[coffeeaddicted]

You can parse expressions inside the "QuickWatch" dialog in VS.