Pesticide

A TUI front-end for the Debug Adapter Protocol.

Motivation

I am an avid kakoune user. Kak is a very niche text editor with few users. As such, it does not have a mature Debug Adapter Protocol plugin.

Kakoune's philosophy is one of orthogonality. A text editor should be just that - a text editor. It should be easy to integrate with other tools in a POSIX environment. As such, Kakoune itself should not be used as a debugging interface, but only as the text editor portion of a debugging interface. Thus, everything except for the text editor itself should be handled by another program or programs. This is where Pesticide fits in.

Goals

Start, manage, and stop DAP sessions
Show variables, watch, stack trace, breakpoints, and all other DAP views
Simple built-in text view for setting breakpoints
Easily integrate with terminal text editors - vim, emacs, and kak - for setting breakpoints and moving around the project
Client-server architecture to allow multiple terminals to show different views

Non-goals

Integrate with GUI text editors
Manage debug adapters
Windows support

Timeline

This project is enormously ambitious for my skill level, but I have plenty of motivation to get it done. I don't want to have to use vscode for debugging any more! As such, it might take a long time to get to a usable state.

Inspirations

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Comments

MVP Checklist
The minimal viable product will have the following features:

[x] Start and stop debug adapters in single session mode

[x] Implement launch request with an external terminal

[ ] Variables, call stack, breakpoints, and source views

[ ] Handle all methods of ending a session (terminate, disconnect, ended)

[ ] Basic kak integration - setting breakpoints, stepping, starting/stopping sessions
opened by raiguard 0