I would like to try and resurrect this conversation. I have found this X11 limitation to be very frustrating. I am going to do a bit of investigation myself. Given that the standard Perl debugger has a hardcoded path for xterms (see https://metacpan.org/source/SHAY/perl-5.28.1/lib/perl5db.pl#L1335), there should be a way to integrate another X program, namely Devel::ptkdb.