Yep, it's horrible. I use Vim 8's Termdebug. It just splits Vim in 3 windows - gdb console on top, program output in the middle, source code on the bottom. It does absolutely nothing fancy - you still type commands in the gdb window - but for me just having all 3 windows together is enough and it's super stable. In general any program that tries to do a fancy interface on Linux will be an absolutely miserable experience, there seems to be zero intersection between people who can write solid software and people who can design UI/UX in OSS and for some reason the two camps can't talk together. C'est la vie, I've just given up and use the console.
This is not really a criticism, just an observation. I suspect it stems from the fact that both software design and interface design are very complicated disciplines, but most OSS projects are done by a single person scratching an itch, so you either have programmers designing interface, or designers programming software, and both don't work out well. I suspect if we had some GUI libraries that were as easy as dumping text to console, the programmers would be able to churn out passable interfaces without having to do design. Quite possibly Tcl/Tk is that library, based on how rough, but usable gitk and git gui are.
This is not really a criticism, just an observation. I suspect it stems from the fact that both software design and interface design are very complicated disciplines, but most OSS projects are done by a single person scratching an itch, so you either have programmers designing interface, or designers programming software, and both don't work out well. I suspect if we had some GUI libraries that were as easy as dumping text to console, the programmers would be able to churn out passable interfaces without having to do design. Quite possibly Tcl/Tk is that library, based on how rough, but usable gitk and git gui are.