Álvaro Ramírez has a very nice post about improving the edebug dislay. He starts be recalling the now nearly 10 year old post from Artur Malabarba on why you should learn to use edebug, the source level Elisp debugger. He says he uses it all the time when he wants to tweak some Emacs behavior.
Edebug will, among other things, let you step through a function and display the results of each expression to the minibuffer. That’s really handy but Ramírez finds it jarring to have to repeatedly move his eyes from the code buffer to the minibuffer. Being Ramírez, he decided to do something about it.
The TL;DR is that he advised the function that displays the value so that the result is displayed on the current line. You can see what that looks like from the animated GIFs on his post. It does seem like a much smoother result and I hope he submits a version upstream as a permanent change.
The big takeaway for me, though, is his account of how he tracked down the appropriate code to advise. If you want to tweak Emacs to do things your way, being able to find the code that needs tweaking is a prerequisite. You can learn a lot about how to do that from Ramírez’s post.
The post is definitely worth a few minutes of your time even if you don’t care about how edebug displays its results. It’s a great example of how it’s not that hard to track down the code that needs your attention.