And this may add a little to your understanding: gdb is a reasonable debugging tool, but is *command line* oriented. By itself, it provides no GUI interface. If you compile with -g then the available symbols let you talk about (non-local) variables, code locations, etc.
emacs is an *editor* that can provide a somewhat GUI-like interface to gdb, by interpreting line numbers coming from gdb and positioning an editor cursor on the indicated line (good for stepping, etc.). And so forth. That is, emacs and gdb can play together reasonably well, but it would probably still feel somewhat primitive compared to advanced GUI interfaces. Eclipse can provide a good GUI interface, perhaps not quite as well integrated for C/C++ as for Java, but I understand it is pretty good. As stated before, it might be a little finicky to set up. Again, I believe it is calling gdb underneath. Hope these distinctions help. Eliot Moss -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple