I thought this (setf (cdr (assoc 'swank::*sldb-string-length* swank:*sldb-printer-bindings*)) 5000) would do the to show my all of a 100-long string in SLDB. (I think the cutoff should be much higher by default, by the way.) But when I looked at locals in SLDB, I had a string of length 100 shown with its first 74 characters, followed by two dots (..). (Uh, not to pile on, but wouldn't three dots (...) be normal?) When I evaluated swank::*sldb-string-length* (typed 'e', swank::*sldb-string-length* to the Eval in frame: prompt below), the value was nil. What is going on? My test was (defun foo () (let ((x (make-string 100 :initial-element #\q))) (break "foo") x)) (foo) The debugger showed me foo [Condition of type SIMPLE-CONDITION] Restarts: 0: [CONTINUE] Return from BREAK. 1: [RETRY] Retry SLIME REPL evaluation request. 2: [*ABORT] Return to SLIME's top level. 3: [ABORT-BREAK] Reset this thread 4: [ABORT] Kill this thread Backtrace: 0: (FOO) Locals: X = "qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq..