The author's frustration with the lack of customizable shortcuts is my biggest issue with chrome devtools as well. This is especially frustrating when I just want to pop a debugger statement in the middle of a node.js unit test so I can step through things, but node.js requires that you use the browser for debugging. (EDIT: apparently there is an IDE from jetbrains[1] that lets you do this too) This past Friday I started poking around to see what it would take to write a terminal-based browser in the style of the python debugger and found that the v8 team at Google has been working making the debugger separable from the browser since at least February of this year[2].
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/
[2] https://github.com/nodejs/node/commit/14174a95a597cac7b848fe...