Enter sticky mode by default with ipdb

Question

When debugging with ipdb, I find it useful to enter in sticky mode to follow the code source. Is there a way to enter automatically in sticky mode without having to type sticky?

Answer 1

Yes, from the REAMDE: put a file named .pdbrc.py in your home directory, containing:

import pdb
class Config(pdb.DefaultConfig):
    sticky_by_default = True

Answer 2

As mentioned in the answer from @Patrick, and the comments on his answer from @bartekbrak, since Pdb++ (pdbpp) is a drop in replacement for pdb you can install it at the same time as ipdb, and since idbp calls pdb you can leverage some of the pdb features, such as sticky.

This is the default .pdbrc.py from https://pypi.org/project/pdbpp/. (I might have changed it). It has sticky included by default and a bunch of other stuff you may like.

Note that Pdb++ is installed as pdbpp but still imports / appears as pdb:

# ~/.pdbrc.py
# https://pypi.org/project/pdbpp/
# pip install pdbpp
# import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

import pdb


class Config(pdb.DefaultConfig):

    # The prompt to show when in interactive mode.
    prompt = '(Pdb++) '

    # Highlight line numbers and the current line when showing the longlist of a function or when in sticky mode.
    highlight = True

    # File encoding.
    # Useful when there are international characters in your string literals or comments.
    encoding = 'utf-8'

    # Determine whether pdb++ starts in sticky mode or not.
    sticky_by_default = False

    # The color to use for line numbers.
    line_number_color = pdb.Color.turquoise

    # The color to use for file names when printing the stack entries.
    filename_color = pdb.Color.yellow

    # The SGR parameters for the ANSI escape sequence to highlight the current line.
    # This is set inside the SGR escape sequence \e[%sm where \e is the ESC character and %s the given value. See SGR parameters.
    # The following means "reset all colors" (0), set foreground color to 18 (48;5;18), and background to 21.
    # The default uses the default foreground (39) and background (49) colors, inversed (7).
    current_line_color = "39;49;7"

    # If pygments is installed and highlight == True, apply syntax highlight to the source code when showing the longlist of a function or when in sticky mode.
    use_pygments = True

    # Passed directly to the pygments.formatters.TerminalFormatter constructor.
    # Selects the color scheme to use, depending on the background color of your terminal.
    # If you have a light background color, try to set it to 'light'.
    bg = 'dark'

    # Passed directly to the pygments.formatters.TerminalFormatter constructor.
    # It expects a dictionary that maps token types to (lightbg, darkbg) color names or None (default: None = use builtin colorscheme).
    colorscheme = None

    # The command to invoke when using the edit command.
    # By default, it uses $EDITOR if set, else vi.
    # The command must support the standard notation COMMAND +n filename to open filename at line n.
    editor = '${EDITOR:-vi}'

    # Truncate lines which exceed the terminal width.
    truncate_long_lines = True

    # Shell command to execute when starting the pdb prompt and the terminal window is not focused.
    # Useful to e.g. play a sound to alert the user that the execution of the program stopped. It requires the wmctrl module.
    exec_if_unfocused = None

    # Old versions of pytest crash when you execute pdb.set_trace() in a test, but the standard output is captured (i.e., without the -s option, which is the default behavior).
    # When this option is on, the stdout capturing is automatically disabled before showing the interactive prompt.
    disable_pytest_capturing = False

    # Certain frames can be hidden by default.
    # If enabled, the commands hf_unhide, hf_hide, and hf_list can be used to control display of them.
    enable_hidden_frames = True

    # If enable_hidden_frames is True this controls if the number of hidden frames gets displayed.
    show_hidden_frames_count = True

    # This method is called during the initialization of the Pdb class.
    # Useful to do complex setup.
    def setup(self, pdb):
        pass

    # Display tracebacks for errors via Pdb.error, that come from Pdb.default (i.e. the execution of an unrecognized pdb command),
    # and are not a direct cause of the expression itself (e.g. NameError with a command like doesnotexist).
    # With this option disabled only *** exception string gets printed, which often misses useful context.
    show_traceback_on_error = True

    # This option sets the limit to be used with traceback.format_exception, when show_traceback_on_error is enabled.
    show_traceback_on_error_limit = None