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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed linum is not more popular in that list (~10% usage).. I definitely thought more people used linum than say something like winner.

Interesting.

Obviously, this type of data submission should be tied into something like package.el, though it is fraught with error.

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At least in my experience, linum makes Emacs 24 unusably slow to respond to typing. I haven't fully isolated this to "linum" vs "linum and XXX together", but when linum-mode is enabled, Emacs is noticeably sluggish.

Magnar had a great hack to only turn it on when you goto-line: http://whattheemacsd.com/key-bindings.el-01.html

Emacs 24 loaded with -Q (so no customizations are loaded) and linum enabled on a large file makes Emacs sluggish. Other line numbering modes also suffer; it appears to be an issue with the gutter itself.

Line numbering is really the vi way of navigation. In Emacs, most people do an incremental search (or M-x occur) to move around.

Line numbering is the way you communicate when you're pair programming, and it's also the way tools tell you about errors - and not all of those tools are integrated, or necessarily work best when integrated, with mode-aware buffers.

For example, I use pry and associated debugger stuff when working with Ruby. Want to set a breakpoint more precisely than a method? Need line numbers. Why would I not want that inside an emacs buffer? Because pry's symbolic completion is integrated with readline.

Breakpoints I agree with.

Pair programming; I just describe the position in the program. Humans are much smarter than computers. "You see where you're catching FooError in Bar?" You can also use your finger to point.

Anyway, I'm not saying you never need to know the line number, but I'm saying it's not the movement idiom in Emacs. In vi, all the motion commands take line numbers as arguments, so you use line numbers to navigate. In Emacs, the commands don't take line numbers as arguments, except for goto-line. (In this case, a leap of faith is necessary. Something tells you, error on line 42. So you tell Emacs to go to line 42. The line you are on now must be line 42. QED.)

    (global-set-key "\C-cg" 'goto-line)

Is handy to navigate quickly to a line number.

M-g g is the default and is just as quick, if not quicker. M-g M-g is an alias; hold alt and double-tap g.

"M-g g & M-g M-g are available starting from Emacs 23.2."

Yeah, no wonder I hadn't heard of it:-) I think I've had that binding since version 20 or 21.

The current line numbers is visible in the modeline and you can use the goto-line to jump to a specific line. And you can always temporarily enable linum-mode if you really need to see all of the line numbers.

One could argue that for any "on screen" navigation (that is: moving to any visible character), there's nothing faster than vim's EasyMotion stuff, which has been adapted in Emacs as "ace-jump-mode". The latest version allows to jump to any character in any window / frame. I hardly "other-window" (C-x o by default in Emacs) anymore because it already takes two keys while in two to three keys I can use ace-jump to jump directly to any character I want, anywhere (instead of first doing C-x o then moving where I want to).

For stuff that is not on-screen, then it's the good old ways.

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