I figured there would be an option in object properties but check box for edges only does something else. The problem is that I don't want to see the mesh on an object that is really dense (that is pretty useless) but I still wanna see the edges on the object I am working on or the 'retopo' object. Freezing the dense…
Even better: map it to a keyboard shortcut . Seeing the edges in shaded mode is a valuable tool and doing it via the dialog popup way is too cumbersome for this . The corresponding UI action is called "Display selected with Edged Faces"