Re: Rant on ...

[Noam Postavsky]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 9:56 PM, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
>> FWIW, I chose this different solution for my init file: when I hit a
>> certain key at any line in the debugger buffer, I get a popup window
>> that shows the according (clicked) frame as pretty printed lisp
>> expression in emacs-lisp-mode.  Having a separate buffer has its
>> advantages, since this expression can be really huge.  The tricky
>> part is to get the correct frame number to pass to `backtrace-frame'.
>>
>> Another command pops up a buffer containing the whole backtrace as a
>> list of lisp expressions.  I chose to bind print-circle -> t for
>> this, because the frames can share large structures.  With print-circle -> 
>> nil, the individual frame are better readable, but the whole thing
>> gets even huger.
>
> That too sounds good.

Yes, actually I've been wanting something like that, could you post
this somewhere?

>
> Lots of room for improvement in *Backtrace* buffers.  For me,
> the most important improvements would be (1) getting rid of the
> bytecode and (2) being able to toggle expansion/contraction of
> `...'.  But all the other suggestions made so far sound good too.
>
> Getting rid of the bytecode is important for communicating by
> copying/pasting backtrace text.  You cannot copy/paste it all
> when some of it is bytecode - you only get the first part of it
> - up to some binary character - and the rest is truncated away.

I've been thinking we could keep the bytecode, but just print it with
the non-text characters escaped. I'll reopen and follow up on the bug
thread tomorrow.