First of all, I agree! GDB without extensions is not that nice to use. But there exist several extensions (
https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard,
https://github.com/hugsy/gef,
https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg,
https://github.com/longld/peda, even though developed for it, these are not only useful for exploit dev!) that make it a lot better.
> - No way to get a 16-column (bytes+ASCII) standard hexdump. This is functionality that even the most basic debugger should have, yet it's missing from gdb.
This should be quite easy to implement as a small python snippet that you put in your ~/.gdbinit. Granted, this should be builtin functionality, but it also shows how extensible GDB can be.
> - If you write "b 0x12345" intending to set a breakpoint at address 0x12345, it doesn't work. An unnecessary and nonsensical extra asterisk is needed (which makes it look like it's retrieving 4/8 bytes from 0x12345, and using that as the address of the breakpoint.)
Agreed, I never understood why that was necessary. It is really annoying. Perhaps someone wanted to avoid a conflict if you had a symbol named "0x12345"? (can you even do that?)
> - Starting gdb with a binary and passing arguments to it --- you'd expect it to be smart enough to realise that anything after the executable name should be the arguments to the debuggee and not the debugger, but it isnt.
I recently learned that gdb has a neat option called --args, that does exactly this:
gdb --args program arg1 arg2
GDB feels quite similar to VIM to me: you have to spent some time to get used to it, it has some warts but it is very flexible and useful if you know it.
> - No way to get a 16-column (bytes+ASCII) standard hexdump. This is functionality that even the most basic debugger should have, yet it's missing from gdb.
This should be quite easy to implement as a small python snippet that you put in your ~/.gdbinit. Granted, this should be builtin functionality, but it also shows how extensible GDB can be.
> - If you write "b 0x12345" intending to set a breakpoint at address 0x12345, it doesn't work. An unnecessary and nonsensical extra asterisk is needed (which makes it look like it's retrieving 4/8 bytes from 0x12345, and using that as the address of the breakpoint.)
Agreed, I never understood why that was necessary. It is really annoying. Perhaps someone wanted to avoid a conflict if you had a symbol named "0x12345"? (can you even do that?)
> - Starting gdb with a binary and passing arguments to it --- you'd expect it to be smart enough to realise that anything after the executable name should be the arguments to the debuggee and not the debugger, but it isnt.
I recently learned that gdb has a neat option called --args, that does exactly this:
GDB feels quite similar to VIM to me: you have to spent some time to get used to it, it has some warts but it is very flexible and useful if you know it.