I love spelunking into unknown codebases with nothing but find and grep. It’s one of the most valuable skills one can develop as a programmer imo and in this video you can see how I approach it.
This video focuses on debugging GUI event handling. At first the bug seemed related to the app’s waveform selection, but I then realized it was a more general topic with the SerenityOS GUI UX — selecting a dropdown entry retains focus, and requires an explicit escape key.
Ultimately I made progress accidentally by hitting the keyboard while the selection was still active, revealing to me that fact (which I hadn’t noticed before).
You can see my general debugging flow:
- Get things building
- How to run app from command line (to see stdout)?
- How to print to stdout?
- Using debug prints to understand the GUI event handling
Overall I’m quite impressed with SerenityOS. I only realized after looking into the code exactly how much code they had written and how fully featured the system is. Well done to the team.