What does the GNU sed debugger interface look like? Which docs did you use, and were they sufficient?

Does the interface resemble that of other GNU tools like bash and make? I've always wondered about these projects. Everyone says that bash and make are hard to debug, but I've never heard of anyone using them. It seems to be more common to use batch mode tracing rather than debugging.

What did you use for the TUI? e.g. Curses?

http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/

http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/

http://gmd.sourceforge.net/

I'll add technical section to readme, but for short. I've used tui-rs[1] with crossterm[2] backend (which handles the actual terminal interaction). The docs may seem intimidating, but it's surprisingly easy to use.

I've considered using curses, but tui-rs seemed that it will be easier to handle. I can certainly recommend it for making tui applications.

I didn't actually use any documentation at all, it wasn't in the man page and I didn't feel like hunting for it, as it was pretty easy to understand just by looking at the output.

Sed debug works by running the code specified just as normal, but it annotates what it does to stdout. So it might look like this: https://gist.github.com/SoptikHa2/a50e90bd1b34c7238944c20d1a...

Sed actually has pretty well-designed interface IMO, it's pretty minimal and has no nasty surprises.

Edit: Here[3] is something I've written about it.

[1]: https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs [2]: https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm [3]: https://soptik.tech/articles/building-desed-the-sed-debugger...

OK thanks, that's helpful! It looks like a lot of the newer terminal rendering library use "diff" style of rendering like web frameworks, rather than something more stateful like curses?

Is that why you thought it would be easier? You just update the entire page on every action, and it takes care of the details of coming up with the minimal terminal codes?

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This is only tangentially related, but for those interested in programming in obscure languages, I recently discovered ble.sh which is a 30K+ line TUI for bash written in pure bash! It does basically what the fish shell does, so it has a terminal rendering library, utf-8 decoder, terminal decoder, bash parser with an AST, etc. all in bash.

https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh

Some details from the author on this wiki page:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/How-Interactive-Shells-...

Other big shell programs:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr...

Latest Oil release makes progress on running these:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/04/release-0.8.pre4.html