The new traceback indicators can be really nice, though at times also quite verbose. #93883/#93994 by @belm0 improved this situation by skipping the indicators for lines where the entire line was indicated, which helps substantially. I'd like to propose that we take this a small step further:

• Skip indicators for lines with a return statement, where every part execpt the return keyword is indicated; e.g. return foo()
• Skip indicators for lines with a simple assignment statement, where the entire rhs is indicated and the lhs consists of a simple name; e.g. name = some.more(complicated, call=here)

These heuristics are slightly more complicated than "don't indicate the entire line", but I argue that in each of these cases the indicators add little to no information, while compressing the traceback makes it easier to navigate and draws attention to the remaining more-specific indicators.

My motivating example is the traceback reported in pytest-dev/pytest#10466, where I count seven already-elided indicator lines, twelve that would be elided by the return heuristic, seven by the simple-assignment heuristic, and four other lines where the indicators would not be affected by this proposal. I'd even argue that dropping uninformative indicators from a majority (19/30) of traceback lines could be considered a bugfix - indicating on 4/30 lines is quite different to 23/30!

Linked PRs

• gh-99180: Remove traceback anchors in return and assign statements that cover all the displayed range #112670
• gh-99180: Make StackSummary.should_show_carets private #119554
• [3.13] gh-99180: Make StackSummary.should_show_carets private (GH-119554) #119556