Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!jbw
From: jbw@bucsf.bu.edu (Joe Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: another Beginner EMACS (really: showing line number)
Message-ID: <40985@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 23 Oct 89 15:32:07 GMT
References: <1030@rodan.acs.syr.edu> <4300055@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <155@salt.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bu-cs.BU.EDU
Organization: Boston University Computer Science Department
Lines: 36

In article <155@salt.UUCP> snow@china.uu.net (John Snow) writes:

   I have reciently started working on a UNIX workstation and have been
   told that EMACS is the editor of choice (obviously these people have
   never used a good text editor on a Macintosh).

I find that although Mac editors are very easy to learn, they are slower
to use than Emacs.  Of course, this only applies after you have learned
Emacs.

You should consider the fact that most (if not all) Mac editors are
actually "word processors".  A word processor is a combined editing and
*typesetting* system.  Emacs does not handle any of the aspects of
typesetting: you must use a typesetting "markup" language.

   But one thing bothers me, since I don't have the visual referenced I'm
   use to, I would at least like to know what line number I'm on.  Is
   there some way to make the line number where the cursor is located
   show up on the information line?

I am assuming that you are using GNU Emacs.

This is difficult, since Emacs is line oriented only in its display.  To
Emacs, a file is simply a long sequence of characters including newlines.
To ask how many newline characters are between "point" and the beginning
of the file makes as much sense as asking how many copies of the letter A
are between point and the beginning of the file.

However, it can be done, in a variety of ways.  What you need to do is
periodically update a variable containing the current line number, and
place a reference to that variable in the mode-line-format variable.

-- 
Joe Wells <jbw@bucsf.bu.edu>
jbw%bucsf.bu.edu@bu-it.bu.edu
...!harvard!bu-cs!bucsf!jbw