Creation and Stopping of Debug Sessions in IntelliJ

Debug session creation is initiated by XDebuggerManager.startSessionAndShowTab , which returns an XDebugSession instance (implemented by XDebugSessionImpl ) and creates a session in the Debug window.

After the session is created, an XDebugProcess is created and the XDebuggerManagerListener receives a processStarted event.

The showToolWindowOnSuspendOnly property determines when the debug UI is shown: true shows it only on breakpoint hit, false shows it by default.

Subsequently, the processHandler#startNotified event is broadcast, and an XDebugProcess is created via XDebugProcessStarter , binding one XDebugProcess to each XDebugSession .

During initialization, XDebugSession registers a listener on the processHandler ; when the handler triggers a processTerminated event, a callback is broadcast.

Debug Stopping

The debug session is managed by XDebugSession , which is linked to an XDebugProcess that in turn holds a processHandler . When the processHandler is destroyed, the XDebugSession is also destroyed.

Debug sessions do not close automatically; users can close them via the UI.

Stopping the debug session works as follows:

Obtain all current RunContentDescriptor objects and iterate to build HandlerItem nodes.

Each HandlerItem has a stop method; invoking it triggers ExecutionManagerImpl.stopProcess(descriptor) to destroy the process.

The final destruction targets a processHandler , which is an instance of DefaultDebugProcessHandler .