Improve debugging text variables
LINQPad is currently very not great at debugging anything with text.
- There is no way to set line endings to Unix vs. Windows
- When I paste text with Unix line endings, LINQPad silently modifies my strings to use Windows newlines. Boo!
- There is no way to see line endings, because they are not shown in the debugger, even with "dump", so when writing string parsing code, my counts are just mysteriously off, more with every line.
- The debugger "VALUES" column uses a variable-width font, so it is hard to compare values at a glance because even those with the same number of characters have very different widths
- Even if using Windows newlines, "dump" loses the ending newline
My suggestion is:
- Show line endings, especially with "dump" which by name I would expect would show me the exactly contents of my variable
- Use a fixed width font when showing values
- Enable a change of line endings. Rider makes this a small button in the extreme lower-right of the screen which shows the current endings, e.g. "CR", and allows you to change them to CR-LF and back.