Keyboard Shortcuts for Debugger Stack Manipulation?

One of my pet peeves is that when debugging, I’m regularly needing to reach for my mouse to go up and down the stack or variables:

Variables

Maybe I missed it somewhere, but are there keyboard shortcuts to make this faster? I didn’t see anything in the docs, Preferences » Menu Shortcuts » Edit…, or when doing a cursory look within Feedback. Heck, I can’t even hit tab to make it to the popup menus. :frowning:

I’m sure I’m not the first one to run across this so maybe there’s already a Feedback item?

Also along these lines and after spending tons of time over the years in Xcode, I’m really used to being able to hit the LLDB debugger and access variables directly via “po variable.” Of course Xojo doesn’t have anything like this at all, but maybe a search field to quickly find something might be helpful.

Anything I’m missing here in Xojo before I file a request?

Nope
The popup menu is, as you guessed , not a real one so it cant get keyboard focus even if you enable that in the System Preferences

I dont know about whether something like po variable could be made to work
LLDB works very differently than Xojo’s debugger

1 Like

Thanks Norm and I guess if I really, really cared about such things I might need to create a Keyboard Maestro macro or two to hotkey things. If I head down this road, I’ll definitely share and post.

Okay I guess I do care about such a thing as I just created some Keyboard Maestro (KM) macros to access the Variable and Stack popup menus in the debugger.

These two Keyboard Maestro (KM) version 9 macros will allow you to access the debugger and stack popup menus via keyboard hot keys. After pressing the hot key you can manipulate the menu with the arrow, return and esc keys. Within Xojo these popup menus are not traditional widgets, and the only way for KM to access them is via image recognition. As such I’ve added in the images and logic for both Light and Dark modes on macOS. Included in this package are the original images used in case the Xojo UI changes in the future.

A Xojo feedback request has been filed on this issue, 61425, so feel free to add points to this request if you’d like to see the Xojo IDE improved with keyboard access to these popup menus.

If you’re a KM user, download these macros from here.

1 Like