Thank you all for the replies.

Lars, I do this already but it only really helps most when it's high contrast (white --> black) like you've shown here. And with that, it hurts my brain for other reasons... I swear I'm not overly sensitive.

Eli, as far as your suggestions, these requirements make sense to me. I took a crack at modifying xdisp.c and was able to display ascii characters by appending to lnum_buf before the numbers are displayed. However, when I tried to hook that into the lisp code and add a variable so that it wouldn't be hardcoded (a must, of course) I fell flat on my face. Converting between character lisp variables to the appropriate C types is above my "undergrad CSCI refresher" pay grade. I wish I could be more helpful but if I were to be the one to submit a pull request I would probably need someone to hold my hand.

Best,

Michael

On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 6:03 AM Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:

Michael Gallagher - NOAA Affiliate <michael.r.gallagher@noaa.gov>
writes:

> The purpose for me is to clearly delineate the
> text/code from the line numbers in a way that makes it easier to grok the
> text being displayed. My brain sees the numbers as part of the code with the
> current formatting of display-line-numbers, but maybe I'm uniquely
> incapable.

Does it help to customize the `line-number' face to something that has a
different background colour than the main text? For instance, setting
the background colour to black gives me this:

--
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no