I am currently computing a lot of ambient occlusions and I have to play around with normals quite a bit.  If anyone has turned on the normals in the display menu you will have often seen that they are really long and can get really confusing.  I was wondering does anyone know how to change this?  If there is no way would it be possible to write a .mel script that altered this?  A few changes I would suggest is to shorten the normals (possibly make a variable slider with this) and a graphical marker to show when the normal is originating from a face rather then just passing through it and originating from another face.  Does anyone have ideas?

Cool, thanks for that.