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Voltron: A hacky debugger UI for hackers
- 0xdada 11y agoI guess the news here is that they now use Capstone. I haven't tried either, but I'm excited for a de-facto standard open-source disassembler. A lot of great tools could come out of it. Now if we had something of similar quality for decompilers...
- seanp2k2 11y ago...after IDAPro is pried from many cold, dead hands.
- redsummer 11y agoCan't you do this with tmux instead?
- raimue 11y agoRead on, this is exactly how it is meant to be used. You can run the various `voltron view` commands in separate panes. This would be a nice example configuration: https://github.com/tuxotron/voltron-tmux https://github.com/tuxotron/voltron-tmux
- Roritharr 11y agoSometimes my girlfriend reminds me that its kinda fucked up that I get excited when the things I need to understand are presented to me in a more readable way but still look like the Matrix to her.
- nxzero 11y ago(Your HN profile link appears to be broken.)
- Roritharr 11y ago(Thanks, I removed them.)
- bnegreve 11y agoIt makes sense actually. The imaginary world in the matrix trilogy is inspired from the unix hacker folklore [1]. So if you're a hacker, it's not surprising that what's on your screen looks like what's on the screens in the Matrix. [1] as shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
- marssaxman 11y agoI could barely restrain my excitement when I first saw the green-screen scrolling visuals in the Matrix, especially the scene at the end where Neo looks underneath the surface of the world. It was the first time Hollywood's cinematic license had created something that looked the way my internal experience felt, and that was a powerful moment after years of eye-rollingly ridiculous movie computer cheese.
- johnmaguire2013 11y agoI could barely restrain my excitement when I first saw the Social Network. I think that movie did a particularly good job of showing real-world hacking.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoMy wife looks over my shoulder and refactors my code.
- HemanHeartYou 11y agoYour wife refactors my code too.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- artpar 11y agoReminds me of softice
- jbverschoor 11y agoWow that looks a lot like softice
- viraptor 11y agoVery close. http://commandercat.com/img/ms06007/softice-1.png http://commandercat.com/img/ms06007/softice-1.png It was a great app.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- snarez 11y agoDefinitely inspired by other debuggers (OllyDbg, Immunity Debugger, etc) that were inspired by SoftICE :)
- marssaxman 11y agoI've never used SoftICE, but my first thought was that it looks a lot like MacsBug. I've always felt grumpy at the amount of work I have to do to convince gdb to show me anything useful when I'm trying to debug a program; it feels like debugging through the wrong end of a telescope. This screen shot feels like an immediate shot of relief - "oh THERE it all is, whew". I don't know if I'd even use all that information very much, but the sense that "all the context is right there in front of you" is a powerful one.
- cosarara97 11y agoIt reminds me of the emacs gdb mode.
- remindsmeofv 11y agoReminds me of visual studio
- js8 11y agoLooks like a nice operating system, but it seems to lack a decent editor.. Edit: Downvoters, can you care to explain? I would actually like someone to reinvent Emacs (or Vim, for that matter) as something more general.
- nxzero 11y ago(This is not an operating system.)
- js8 11y agoFor lack of a better word, yes! You're taking it too literally - if I wrote something else, then I couldn't make a subtle reference to Emacs. I wish this project success, and if it will be successful, it will no doubt evolve into having it's own scripting language and other things. Basically, it will become "operating system" like Emacs. PS. It's unfortunate that people here downvote for misunderstanding a common reference.
- gjm11 11y ago> It's unfortunate that people here downvote for misunderstanding a common reference. No, people here downvote for saying things that don't actually add to the conversation. "Hey, I know an old joke about Emacs!" doesn't add anything to the conversation here. (Voltron is not particularly Emacs-like; its readme says in its second paragraph that it "doesn't aim to be everything to everyone"; it's not a thing anyone is going to spend all their time in; the parallels it would take to make the reference apposite really aren't there.) Also, I think you botched the joke; "... but it seems to lack a decent debugger" would have fitted the pattern better. (But it still wouldn't have been either very funny or very insightful.) Oh, and I downvoted your second comment for complaining about being downvoted; I have a policy of always downvoting waah-I-was-downvoted comments when I see them. (Unless what they're complaining about is a very clear injustice, which it isn't here.)
- js8 11y agoActually, I didn't botch the joke - it was you who missed the subtle point I was making. I think that, paradoxically, this may evolve eventually to more complete (operating) system with an editor, just like Emacs has a debugger. That's why I asked the question, and made a clarification (which unfortunately killed the reason for being subtle) - your "doesn't add anything to the conversation" missed the point! (Actually, downvoting without a comment doesn't addd anything to the conversation either.)
- XorNot 11y agoI've just never been a fan of console-based debugging. The greatest thing an IDE brings to the table for me is debugging against a GUI editor window.
- thomasahle 11y agoFrom the screenshot it appears as if they're debugging a program, for which they don't have the source code. Debugging against an editor window probably wouldn't help here.
- bjackman 11y agoI recently discovered you can use GDB from inside Emacs. [1] Before, I always used some awkward IDE to debug with a live source view, then switched back to my editor to fiddle with code... but with this things are finally unified! (Of course, to use it you first have to be able to tread water in Emacs...) https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/GDB-Graphical-Interface.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/GD...
- lallysingh 11y agomany-windows mode is really nice. But this offers memory dumps, which I miss from codewarrior.
- jiiam 11y agoSeems good. Actually what I like most is that it appears to be well documented, so it might be worth a try. I always found cumbersome to use console based debuggers, and wonder if there's any real advantage once the learning curve as been climbed.
- trufflepiggames 11y agoOmg, I don't know if anyone would hack this game? http://www.bridezilla-game.com/ http://www.bridezilla-game.com/
- aparadja 11y agoPlease stop spamming HN. It's a nofollow link anyway.
- trufflepiggames 11y agoWhat are you? A rocket scientist?
- greggman 11y agoSo... if it works cool but just in case I thought I'd point out some alternatives * emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Debuggers.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/De... * VSCode https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/extensions/example-debuggers https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/extensions/example-debugg... * Slickedit https://www.slickedit.com/products/slickedit/343-slickedit-has-debuggers https://www.slickedit.com/products/slickedit/343-slickedit-h...
- oneweekwonder 11y agoCan those alternatives debug without the source, which seems like one of the features of voltron? Adding to your possible alternative list: * vim https://github.com/joonty/vdebug https://github.com/joonty/vdebug
- mpeg 11y agoYou're getting downvoted because this is not a code editor, it's a frontend for several debugger backends that would mostly be used when you don't have access to source code.
- raimue 11y agoI saw this before and it always looked like a nice pice of software. The sad part is, it is still at "0 releases". To the developers of this software: please provide a stable release that can be packaged for the popular package managers/distributions. That will help to spread the word about your work and make it easily accessible.
- snarez 11y agoOK
- Roritharr 11y agoThat was quick. https://github.com/snare/voltron/releases/tag/v0.1.1 https://github.com/snare/voltron/releases/tag/v0.1.1
- snarez 11y agoThere was actually already a v0.1 release on PyPI and had been for some time, it just wasn't tagged on GitHub. The README says to use `pip install voltron`.
- boxfire 11y agoRTFM? Release versions are on pip. Unfortunately most distros think they have the one holy package management solution. pip IS a release and distribution system. With the current popularity of Python, it is only going to be a matter of time before apt / rpm / etc support working through it.
- tomc1985 11y agoIt is trivial to generate a .deb from nearly any pip module... sudo apt-get install devscripts python-all-dev python-stdeb; cd path~to~pip; python setup.py --command-packages=stdeb.command bdist_deb
- duaneb 11y agoIt's trivial to do a lot of niche catering and die by a thousand cuts. It's also trivial to install pip.
- svlasov 11y agoCat it be used in a more traditional use case with source available and locals/watch/etc views?
- snarez 11y agoIt has a "command" view which executes a debugger command and displays the output each time the debugger "stops" (ie. whenever you step over an instruction or a line of code, or hit a breakpoint, etc). So anything you can do with a debugger command, you can stick in a view. e.g. $ voltron v c "fr v" $ voltron v c "source list -a \$rip" http://i.imgur.com/2505o16.png http://i.imgur.com/2505o16.png
- caf 11y agoDoes it work with disassembly-flavor att ?
- snarez 11y agoNo syntax highlighting for AT&T syntax atm. It still displays it, just not highlighted. Feel free to add a Pygments lexer for it and send me a PR :) I'll probably get to it some time, but there's other stuff ahead of it in the queue.
- altano 11y agoDo people outside of MS actually use WinDbg?
- mpeg 11y agoMostly Microsoft or Windows device driver developers, but also people who want to reverse engineer device drivers. There's many DRM / anti-hacking tools that rely on windows drivers to hook Windows kernel APIs at the lowest level they can.
- snarez 11y agoYeah security people use WinDbg a lot.
- dr_zoidberg 11y agoA few friends of mine that do memory forensics made extensive use of WinDBG to debug memory translation code. In the memory forensics developer community (yeah, very specific) WinDBG is one of the most reliable tools to use.
- ShroudedNight 11y agoWe [IBM JIT for J9 team] use WinDBG as part of our tools to debug problems that show up on Windows.
- dman 11y agoI use it often via gflags to start on process startup, because WinDbg startup is a lot faster than letting the process crash, windows showing the error dialog, and then clicking in the visual studio version selector to select Visual Studio.
- idsout 11y agoReminds me of gdb-dashboard [1] with the additional debugging engines supported. Very nice. [1] https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard
- matt4077 11y ago<This is where I was being stupid before. I have removed that stupidity.>
- infinite8s 11y agoI think you misread the title. It is a system for composing UIs for hackers running debuggers, not a UI for 'hackernews'.
- BHSPitMonkey 11y agoThis is a debugger, not a HN reader. Maybe you commented on the wrong post by accident.