Debugging UI

Controlling GEF's User Interface.

These commands are used to control GEF's interface.

context

The context is the heart of GEF. It provides the state of the registers, stack, instruction pointer, threads, and stack trace. The context loads and updates automatically as you run the program.

This is what the context pane looks like:

GEF Context Pane

Use context to refresh the context. This prints the current context. This is useful if you have printed other data and want to re-see the context.

You can use gef config context.layout to change the layout of the context. By default, all sections are shown.

gef➤  gef config context.layout
─────────────────────────────────── GEF configuration setting: context.layout ───────────────────────────────────
context.layout (str) = "legend regs stack code args source memory threads trace extra libc_function_args syscall_args libc_function_args syscall_args libc_function_args syscall_args"

Description:
        Change the order/presence of the context sections

To hide a section, prepend the section name with a - (or omit it).

gef➤ gef config context.layout "-legend regs stack code args -source -threads -trace extra memory"

This configuration will not display the legend, source, threads, and trace sections.

The following are also customizable:

• nb_lines_stack: The number of lines of the stack to show.

• nb_lines_backtrace: The number of lines of the backtrace to show.

• nb_lines_code and nb_lines_code_prev: The number of lines of code to show before and after the current instruction.

• context.nb_lines_threads: The number of lines of the threads to show.

Finally, you can change the direction that the stack grows using:

gef➤ gef config context.grow_stack_down True

This configuration will display the stack with the largest addresses at the top.

tmux-setup

To make GEF's output more readable, you can use the tmux-setup command to format the GEF window inside tmux. This will split the plane vertically and place the context in the right-hand pane.

Using tmux-setup in GEF

As you enter commands on the left side, the context will update on the right.