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From: rms@mit-prep
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: line number display
Message-ID: <110@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Oct-85 22:58:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.110
Posted: Wed Oct 16 22:58:22 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 01:42:51 EDT
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Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
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From: Richard M. Stallman <rms@mit-prep>
The way the buffer is stored, it is not easy to do this.
The only way to tell what line number anything is
is to count all the newlines.  To make this work fast enough,
it would have to remember the line number of the first
line from the previous redisplay and detect the usual
case in which the text above the window start has not
changed since then.  Most of the mechanism for this
exists already.

I don't think I will write this; I think M-x what-line
is good enough for finding a line number, and I think
it is more important to keep the size of Emacs down.

Sadly, the extensibility of Emacs doesn't help here, because it is
inside of redisplay, which has to be all in C to be fast enough.