Debugging Vim Crashes with WinDbg and Opening Minidumps

the process. Visual Studio will pop up another dialog, telling you that no symbols are loaded and that the source code cannot be displayed. Click OK. Several windows will open. Right-click in the Call Stack window. Choose Load Symbols. The Find Symbols dialog will open, looking for (g)vim.pdb. Navigate to the directory where you have the PDB file and click Open. At this point, you should have a full call stack with vim function names and line numbers. Double-click one of the lines and the Find Source dialog will appear. Navigate to the directory where the Vim source is (if you have it.) If you don't know how to debug this any further, follow the instructions at ":help bug-report". Paste the call stack into the bug report. If you have a non-free version of Visual Studio, you can save a minidump via the Debug menu and send it with the bug report. A minidump is a small file (<100KB), which contains information about the state of your process. Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition cannot save minidumps and it cannot be installed as a just-in-time debugger. Use WinDbg, |debug-windbg|, if you need to save minidumps or you want a just-in-time (postmortem) debugger. *debug-windbg* 3.3 Debugging Vim crashes with WinDbg ~ See |get-ms-debuggers| to obtain a copy of WinDbg. As with the Visual Studio IDE, you can attach WinDbg to a running Vim process. You can also have your system automatically invoke WinDbg as a postmortem debugger. To set WinDbg as your postmortem debugger, run "windbg -I". To attach WinDbg to a running Vim process, launch WinDbg. On the File menu, choose Attach to a Process. Select the Vim process and click OK. At this point, choose Symbol File Path on the File menu, and add the folder containing your Vim PDB to the sympath. If you have Vim source available, use Source File Path on the File menu. You can now open source files in WinDbg and set breakpoints, if you like. Reproduce your crash. WinDbg should open the source file at the point of the crash. Using the View menu, you can examine the call stack, local variables, watch windows, and so on. If WinDbg is your postmortem debugger, you do not need to attach WinDbg to your Vim process. Simply reproduce the crash and WinDbg will launch automatically. As above, set the Symbol File Path and the Source File Path. To save a minidump, type the following at the WinDbg command line: > .dump vim.dmp < *debug-minidump* 3.4 Opening a Minidump ~ If you have a minidump file, you can open it in Visual Studio or in WinDbg. In Visual Studio 2005: on the File menu, choose Open, then Project/Solution. Navigate to the .dmp file and open it. Now press F5 to invoke the debugger. Follow the instructions in |debug-vs2005| to set the Symbol File Path. In WinDbg: choose Open Crash Dump on the File menu. Follow the instructions in |debug-windbg| to set the Symbol File Path. *get-ms-debuggers* 3.5 Obtaining Microsoft Debugging Tools ~ Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition can be downloaded for free from: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ vim:tw=78:ts=8:noet:ft=help:norl:

This section details how to debug Vim crashes using WinDbg, including attaching WinDbg to a running process, setting WinDbg as a postmortem debugger, setting the symbol file path and source file path, and saving a minidump. It also describes how to open and debug using a minidump file in both Visual Studio and WinDbg. Finally, it provides a link for downloading Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition.