There are two separate questions: whether you want to see some kind of trace of the program or you want to step around in its state, and whether to use a "real"

There are two separate questions: whether you want to see some kind of trace of the program or you want to step around in its state, and whether to use a "real" debugger or not. In most cases I prefer to do something trace-based, and in the IDEs I've used the debuggers have much weaker support for that than they do for stepping around. In particular, setting up tracepoints tends to involve fiddly dialog boxes which are much less convenient than using the main text-editor interface to say what you want. I think there's plenty of scope for debuggers to provide a better interface for trace-style debugging. For example I'd like to be able to toggle a tracepoint after capturing the run, and have the lines it created appear or disappear, or add a filter expression or additional information to display without having to rerun the program.