How to highlight and color gdb output during interactive debugging?

Question

Please don\'t reply I should use ffffd, nemiver, emacs, vim, or any other front-end, I just prefer gdb as it is, but would like to see its output with some terminal colors.

Answer 1

New in upcoming GDB 8.3!

https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob;f=gdb/NEWS

Terminal styling is now available for the CLI and the TUI. GNU Source Highlight can additionally be used to provide styling of source code snippets. See the "set style" commands, below, for more information.

Answer 2

.gdbinit

You can tweak your ~/.gdbinit to have colors. You can use mammon's .gdbinit which is available here:

https://github.com/gdbinit/gdbinit

You can tweak it as much as you want too. I found this thanks to this SO answer. Here's the kind of output that you can obtain:

A GitHub repository is also available: https://github.com/gdbinit/Gdbinit

On a side note, the same idea was also applied to lldb.

GDB Dashboard

Following the same concept, GDB Dashboard provides a modular visual interface for GDB in Python.

(void)walker

Another similar project uses GDB's Python support to provide more extensibility, so this is worth checking out: https://github.com/dholm/voidwalker

@dholm also provides his own .gdbinit inspired from the previous one.

pwndbg

Some projects provide a set of useful functions, including improved display. This is the case for PEDA or pwndbg. The latter gives the following description:

A PEDA replacement. In the spirit of our good friend windbg, pwndbg is pronounced pwnd-bag.

• Speed
• Resiliency
• Clean code

It provides commands to support debugging and exploit development similar to the ones from PEDA, and better display (although this is not the main focus of the project). The software is still under development, and has not been properly released yet.

voltron

The project description states:

Voltron is an extensible debugger UI for hackers. It allows you to attach utility views running in other terminals to your debugger (LLDB or GDB), displaying helpful information such as disassembly, stack contents, register values, etc, while still giving you the same debugger CLI you're used to.

You can modify your .gdbinit to automatically integrate it. However, the display itself is outside of GDB (e.g. in a tmux split).

GEF

GEF is another option, and it is described as:

It is aimed to be used mostly by exploiters and reverse-engineers, to provide additional features to GDB using the Python API to assist during the process of dynamic analysis and exploit development.

Answer 3

you can get whatever colors you want;

# gdb
(gdb) shell echo -en '\E[47;34m'"\033[1m"
...
anything is now blue foreground and white background
...
(gdb) shell tput sgr0
... back to normal

Answer 4

Another good combination of colors is given by this configuration. It renders inspecting the backtraces a lot easier. To use it, just save that file as ~/.gdbinit and run gdb normally

Answer 5

Neat, I just found this hack using colout: https://github.com/nojhan/colout/blob/master/colout/example.gdbinit