Re: Native display of line numbers

[Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com>]

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Hi Eli,

First of all, thank you for working on this!

On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 11:12 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> I generally consider display of line numbers for each line in the
> buffer un-Emacsy, something that came from the dark era when we needed
> to count lines to be able to tell the then existing editors something
> like "move down N lines, then DO SOMETHING".  Emacs pioneered today's
> world where all this is unnecessary, and the rest is history.
>

While I don't use the line numbers that way, it's very useful to pinpoint a
colleague directly to a piece of code, especially when not sharing the code
visually; like when over a phone call: "Hey, open up the "foo" file and
look at line 1534.". Nothing beats the precision of that.


> However, many users want line numbers to be displayed in Emacs.  I
> don't know why they want it, perhaps they were "spoiled" by other IDEs
> or something.


Above.


> So with that in mind, I came up with an implementation of a native
> display of line numbers.  You can find it in the scratch/line-numbers
> branch of the Emacs repository.


Thanks!


> Compared with linum-mode,
> nlinum-mode, and other similar modes, it has the following main
> advantages:
>
>   . it works significantly faster (almost twice as fast as linum-mode,
>     50% faster that relative-line-numbers-mode)
>

How does it compare to nlinum.el in your initial testing? I will also test
it out over next few days.


> Please give it a try and report any bugs you find.
>

Here's my first observation after building from that branch.

In the below image, on the left I have emacs -Q running that has the new
line number feature enabled, and on the right I have older emacs instance
running with nlinum.el enabled.

[image: image.png]
Can you please add support for highlighting the current line number, using
a different face (See the highlighted line number by nlinum on the right
hand side)?

About the code:

+(defun toggle-display-line-numbers ()
+ (interactive)
+ (if display-line-numbers
+ (setq display-line-numbers nil)
+ (setq display-line-numbers t))
+ (force-mode-line-update))

Instead of this, about about a minor mode with an intuitive name like
"line-numbers-mode"? Above also has an issue, I believe.. If user has set
display-line-numbers to 'relative, toggling it will always set it back to t.

How about leaving the buffer local display-line-numbers definition as it
is, but replacing toggle-display-line-numbers function with a minor mode
line-numbers-mode?

Thanks!
-- 

Kaushal Modi

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