[__d]

You should try the Visual Studio debugger one day. It's kinda the yardstick for graphical debuggers.

gdb is a fine tool, but I think the VS debugger is reasonably described as "next level".

Many people don't know about Microsoft's other debugger, WinDbg. It's actually more capable than the VS debugger, but the UI is closer to that of gdb.

[grlass]

I would be keen to try, but afaik there's no way to do it on Linux which is my main dev/deploy environment.

It feels like Linux debugging is stuck in a viscous cycle, since few people are putting the capital into a decent debugger UI, and thus few people are using debugging UIs (and thus using printf debugging, or gdb CLI). Folk might not realise how much better it could be.