A long time ago in 2017 I wrote a package based Delphi IDE wizard that added something like the debug visualizers introduced with Delphi 2010 to older IDE versions, namely all versions from Delphi 2005 upwards. This was a hack that hooked deeply into the internals to read the debugger output and replace it with something more useful, e.g. the name of a TColor variable rather than the integer value, or the actual date and time encoded in a TDateTime variable rather than the floating point representation, or a multi line string without the quotes but with line feeds. It looked like this:
In addition to the Watch List, the Local Variables windows it also supported the Evaluate and Modify window. Where I added new modifiers to tell the expert that it should use a different output format:
Years later in 2024 I got interested in debug visualizers again and this time using the official Open Tools API, re-created the ones for TColor and multi line strings and several new ones for Delphi 10.2 and 12. The code should work for all Delphi versions starting from Delphi 2010.
These now look like this:
The source code is avilable from SourceForge. To install it, just load the package into the IDE and select “Install” from the context menu in the Project Manager window.
I blogged about this expert several times.