Looking for more debugger The first post resulted in a ton of suggestions and I tried them all. gdb -tui (again) C-l fixes the display and using gdb -tty $SOME_OTHER_TTY stops it from getting messed up in the first place. Readline bindings (C-n, C-p etc) work in the command window even while the source window has focus. focus cmd gives focus to the command window so I can use arrow keys again. C-x A is supposed to toggle the tui but for me just crashes, in both alacritty and xterm. I've reported this against nix for now, since that's the most likely culprit. (EDIT nope, it was a gdb bug).