Thank you very much. It works. I knew line-number-display-limit but didn't know line-number-display-limit-width. > From: drew.adams@oracle.com > To: schwab@linux-m68k.org; netjunegg@outlook.com > Subject: RE: with text file including very long lines, line number field of mode line becomes "??" > Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2012 08:47:30 -0800 > CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org > > > See line-number-display-limit and line-number-display-limit-width. > > Maybe the popup menu over the line number could have an item that takes you to > the doc for those vars when `??' is displayed: (emacs) `Optional Mode Line'. > > IOW, `??' says only "No idea what the line number is". It could help to also > point users to info on how to control/fix this. > > And/or a popup item could just increase the limit to make it big enough to show > the number of the last line number for the current buffer. > >