Short reply for now... will get into more details when I'm not so "squeezed" for time.
For instance the trick about "@textvar[0]" to not have every character individually enclosed in single quotes is quite useful
While it might be worth advertising, I wouldn't name it a "trick".
It is normal pascal syntax. You simply watch an expression that returns a "pchar" => so you get to see a pchar. (which is displayed as string)
I agree, "trick" isn't really a good description but, I can't think of a good one at this time. "options" maybe ?
Maybe you can open a new topic on that (and moderate the topic), and see what others think.
I intend to do that. Hopefully today or tomorrow.
In general, the debugger has tons of features that are probably seldom used.
I think the real challenge is in figuring out which features are seldom used because they are seldom needed compared to which features are seldom used because they are not common knowledge, e.g, the construct "Ptr[a..b]" is logical but, I didn't know about it and I wouldn't have thought of using it because it's not a valid Pascal statement. Constructions like that are debugging pearls, extremely useful.
A related but slightly different note, I think that there is a natural fork occurring. By that I mean, FpDebug is really a different debugger than GDB and it will work differently, as a result, I believe that some features are forcefully going to be FpDebug only or GDB only and I think that's natural. Honestly, at this point, I care very little about GDB. I realize that's because on Windows FpDebug has gotten quite capable making GDB unnecessary but, that may not be the case on other platforms I don't use. The point here is, at least on Windows, I think GDB is, in the majority of cases, legacy stuff.
There are a couple of other things you said I should address, I intend to get to them as soon as reasonably convenient. There are too many things in my head and some are leaking
I like the new layout of the formatting options... I have about $0.02 worth of comments to mention... next post!