Edebug's recursion limit is currently 150, but this is not enough for the following files in the Emacs source tree: lisp/calc/calc-ext.el lisp/help-macro.el lisp/international/fontset.el The latter two can be successfully instrumented with edebug-max-depth set to 200, but the minimum value necessary for calc-ext.el is somewhere between 500 and 1000. All three of these files contain large quoted lists. I'm attaching a patch to accomplish this. I chose to mention max-lisp-eval-depth and max-specpdl-size in the defcustom docstring, but I also noticed that Edebug temporarily bumps max-lisp-eval-depth up by 800 while it's working. I could modify the patch to replace the 800 by something along the lines of (+ 200 (* max-edebug-depth 4)), if someone with more Emacs experience than me says it is a good idea. Edebug also increases max-specpdl-size (by 2000) so that probably would also need to be changed in the code.