I wrote https://github.com/daym/idea-native2-debugger as a stop-gap. It uses gdb and works in IntelliJ IDEA Community edition. Setting it up the first time is kinda weird since you need to add a new run/debug configuration "Native2Debugger". I could not figure out how to hook this directly into the existing run configuration that you use to run your program to begin with. Otherwise, I like how it turned out.

If you want a standalone frontend instead, https://github.com/epasveer/seer is extremely good.

And emacs has gdb integration. By now I tried it, and... I guess it's better than nothing.

I'll preface this with 'it might not be what you're looking for, but I've found useful in this space', but gdb has multiple interfaces built in to the normal binary. It's not just the raw gdb command prompt, but it has a pretty nice curses mode that'll display registers, asm, source with breakpoints, etc. that you expect from a debugger interface. It's very much a hidden gem of gdb.

https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/TUI.h...

gf2 is worth looking at: https://github.com/nakst/gf

If you need something text based, cgdb is nice: http://cgdb.github.io/

Qt Creator is not terrible. I've yet to come across a GDB front-end I would qualify as "good".

It is a full IDE for writing Qt apps, but it also works for non-Qt applications in C or C++ (cmake recommended), and it has some of the best GDB integration. It is also free (GPLv3).

I think gdbgui [0] is useful. I'm not sure about its performance though.

[0] https://www.gdbgui.com/

Have you tried the Emacs gdb mode?

VS Code has been sufficient for me, at least for hobby stuff. I used it solely as a debugger before I switched over to using it as an editor as well.

There is also GEF, which is widely used by the reverse engineering and CTF community.

https://github.com/hugsy/gef

Sounds like you want a full UI, but GEF is quite good for making GDB pleasant to use.

CLion is definitely good.