Dr Konqi now with colors (Updated)

Hey there :)

As I announced on the kde-core-devel mailing list, I planned to improve Dr Konqi for a long time, as for me as a developer it is an invaluable tool. Well, yesterday I sat down and implemented the first two things which I wanted for a long time:

Scroll to KCrash

Once the backtrace got loaded, Dr Konqi will automatically scroll to the line that contains [KCrash Handler]. No need to find that manually anymore. Awesome :)

Colors!

Yeah, you should know that I as a KDevelop user and developer am addicted to syntax highlighting. That’s what I did for Dr Konqi as well now:

Dr Konqi with syntax highlighted GDB backtrace

So anyone using KDEBase trunk will now have a shiny Dr Konqi :) Feedback appreciated, esp. whether more or less should be highlighted. I personally found it overly colorful when I also highlighted pointer adresses (ignore the bug in that outdated screenshot). What do you think?

Anyhow, thanks to George Kiagiadakis for helping me find my way through Dr Konqi sources and accepting my feature additions.

Update

I put some more feedback into reality: Fixed width font, null pointers are bold and in addition common functions that lead to exits are now highlighted in red (i.e. qFatal, __assert_fail and abort):

Dr Konqi showing fixed width fonts and highlighted qFatal / abort functions

Comments

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Comment by Diederik van der Boor (not verified) (2010-08-19 09:36:00)

I one word: Awesome!!!

ANd a nice attention to detail :)

Comment by Eike Hein (not verified) (2010-08-19 02:21:00)

My concern here is that you will discourage developers from fixing crashes by making them too pretty! :)

Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-08-18 20:05:00)

I like the yellow for pointers. Null pointers should be bolded, as well.

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-08-20 17:46:00)

null ptrs are now bold and qFatal, __assert_fail and abort functions are now highlighted red as well.

Comment by Arno Rehn (not verified) (2010-08-18 19:13:00)

I wouldn’t highlight each and every pointer address, but highlighting null pointers might be a good idea. In many cases they are somehow involved in the crash, so the highlighting can help trace the problem.

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-08-20 16:05:00)

uhm, take another look at the screenshot… you see the red 0x0? It’s already highlighted :P

Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-08-18 21:28:00)

I agree. Pointer addresses don’t offer much new information (at least not to me), but finding null pointers in useful.

Anyway, thanks for this great work, I must say I love the highlighting in KDevelop, so I’m happy to see it here too :)

Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-08-18 18:16:00)

You are not a secret son of David Faure?

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-08-20 16:05:00)

haha no :) but thanks for the compliment.

Comment by bbroeksema (not verified) (2010-08-18 18:02:00)

How about clickable links when a valid file url is found? Bonus points when it opens up an editor and scrolls to the correct line .

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-08-20 16:05:00)

it’s on my todo :)

Comment by Anonymous (not verified) (2010-08-18 17:56:00)

Looks really good. How about if you simply make the pointer addresses italicised? It differentiates them without making them glare at the user.

Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-08-20 17:46:00)

nah, that doesn’t look any good.

Published on August 20, 2010.

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