Usage

Open a terminal and start a VIM with servername 'PDB'. For this there's a console script vimpdb installed by this egg:

$ vimpdb

Then, from the program to be debugged use it like pdb,

>>> import vimpdb; vimpdb . set_trace()

(the blanks above are needed due to some dumb SVN precommit hook)

When this line is hit, PDB starts and your PDB-VIM should load the source code and highlight the current LOC. Additionally you should get a "PDB" menu, where you can set/toggle breakpoints etc.

The vimpdb script tries to launch MacVIM, which it will try to locate using the GVIM environment variable:

$ export GVIM=/User/seletz/bin/mvim

Note, the mvim script is a bash script included in the MacVIM package which tries to locate the MacVIM executable. If you have MacVIM in /Applications, then this should "Just Work". For convenience, the above variable should be put in your ~/.bash_profile or similar.

How does (should) that work?

vimpdb is a subclass of pdb.Pdb, which hijacks the command loop and listens for UDP packets on port 6666 (blocking). To inform the VIM process what's happening, it uses VIM's remote commands.

On the VIM side there's basically just a VIM script which does the higlight, set up the menu, and defines a function to send UDP messages.

That's all.

Bugs

• sometimes the vim script is not sourced correctly
• there are no easy keyboard commands for using the debugger, one needs to use the menu.
• no security
• network settings hard coded

Changes

2008-06-27 seletz

• added vimpdb script
• added "exit" callback