gdb manages to include a lot of relatively obscure features while missing out on a lot of obvious ones.
>>39
Either of
>>29 or
>>37 is much better than what gdb can do. Bytes + ASCII goes back before CP/M. Possibly early UNIX era.
Even DEBUG is easier to use than gdb, at least its frequently used commands are all 1 character. (I know about the partial match feature, but the documentation is a bit vague.) The "show registers and current instruction after each step" is also
very helpful when tracing.
For an example of how the bytes+ASCII has become nearly standard, Google "hexdump" as images and count how many are bytes+ASCII and how many only bytes.