ASM Debuggers that visualize the stack (beginner friendly)

Question

(Cross-posted from Stack Overflow)

Are there any debuggers that constantly show a visual of the stack and where everything is within it? For example, taking some random image:

I use gdb for most debugging/learning, and while it does show the registers, I have to do something like x/8gx $rbp-32 everytime I want to see the stack -- and from that I usually figure out how I want the data to show.

Are there any debuggers that make this information friendlier and more visual? I am very, very new to asm and the visual does help when debugging the information. (I'm hoping some off-the-shelf product such as Hopper, IDA, x86db, etc.)

Answer 1

I assume you are using *nix based systems since you mentioned gdb. If you just want to print the stack/registers when you hit a break point, you can use command to set up some print statements. See here.

Installing pwndbg makes it a lot less exhausting as it prints out the stack and registers every time you step, with labels on the stack identifying rbp and rsp. Additionally there are tools like GEF and PEDA that are similar, but I don't have any firsthand experience with them.

Additionally, there are a few debuggers with GUIs, if that is what you are looking for:

• ddd: graphical front end for gdb, but you'll still see the stack as a list of values.

• edb: similar to ollydbg, but for Linux.

• gdbgui: browser based frontend for gdb.

Answer 2

Borland's Turbo Debugger also has a text-window-based UI, with the stack in its own window and showing which values in which locations. It doesn't tell you what those values represent, but at least it's always visible.