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 wrote: > Michael Gallagher - NOAA Affiliate > 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 > -- Michael Gallagher, PhD CIRES Research Scientist Polar Observations and Processes Team (ESRL/NOAA/PSD) 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80305