How to debug c programs by gedit?
Is it possible to debug our programs written in c by gedit text editor ? If not, how can i do it ?
gedit
is a text editor - it will color the syntax but won't help you compile or debug it. What I suggest you use is geany
. It is a very simple, very easy to use IDE, which you can use to write,compile, and debug. It's available through either Software Center or sudo apt-get install geany
Gedit Plug-ins
Use gedit
external terminal plug-in
You can use gedit
with terminal plugin. The steps are fairly straight-forward:
- Enable "Universe" repository
- Install
gedit-plugins
- Activate "Embedded Terminal"
- Use Ctrl+F9 to open terminal
- Other
gedit
plug-ins
Step 1. Enable "Universe" repository
The first step is to ensure Universe
repository is activated from Settings
->Software & Updates
->Ubuntu Software
and ensure the third option is checked:
Step 2. Install gedit-plugins
Install gedit-plugs
with the command:
sudo apt install gedit-plugins
Step 3. Activate "Embedded Terminal"
Open gedit
(don't use sudo
) and select Edit
->Preferences
->Plugins
and check off Embedded Terminal
:
Step 4. Use Ctrl+F9 to open terminal
In the GIF below we use Ctrl+F9 to get a tiny window with the command prompt. Use the mouse to click and drag the dividing line up to reveal an approximate size of 24x80.
The colors are dreadful! (with default gedit
color scheme). I was just learning this as creating the answer so my mouse movements are slow below...
Step 5. Other gedit
plug-ins
As mentioned in Step 4., you can grab the separator bar to make the terminal window bigger. Here's what it looks like in a normal picture ((not a GIF).
There are three other plug-ins I currently use in the gedit
coding window:
- plug-in to display 80 character cut-off with different background color
- plug-in to display entire document in thumbnail you can drag to quickly go to code section
- Highlight matching brackets
Additionally there is an external add-on I'd like to install for shellcheck
linter / checker that shows bash code errors. I haven't searched for a lint checker for other languages but obviously you can enter gcc
and other commands directly into gedit
terminal window.
For further reading please see:
- Code completion for gedit
- Useful Gedit plugins for programmers - HowtoForge
- gedit: Add Python / C++ Autocomplete Support - nixCraft
- 5 Must-Have Gedit Plugins for Programmers | Yaser Sulaiman's Blog
- How to C program in gedit - Quora