Personally I use the TUI, but I completely get where your coming from - the TUI is really pretty lame for all that it does compared to all that it could do.
That said, the debugging I do is all from the command-line anyway, so all I really want is a way to quickly view the assembly and registers when I break, which the TUI does quite well.
As a note - I think the person in the audience was trying to get at the fact that gdb (like tons of cli programs) uses readline() for input. readline() can be configured to use emacs or vi keybindings, with emacs the default - hence why ctrl-p and ctrl-n work. I personally use vi keybindings, so in gdb I can use ESC, and then jk to go up and down the command history.
That said, the debugging I do is all from the command-line anyway, so all I really want is a way to quickly view the assembly and registers when I break, which the TUI does quite well.
As a note - I think the person in the audience was trying to get at the fact that gdb (like tons of cli programs) uses readline() for input. readline() can be configured to use emacs or vi keybindings, with emacs the default - hence why ctrl-p and ctrl-n work. I personally use vi keybindings, so in gdb I can use ESC, and then jk to go up and down the command history.