[Beowulf] Re: Religious wars

[Perry E. Metzger]

Jim Lux <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
>> I like line numbers to help me figure out if I have a really long
>> line of text.  Most text editors do a poor job of handling this
>> case, happily wrapping it, without telling you, so your key
>> navigation across the long lines looks really funky.
>
> Line numbers are handy when you get that
>
> "syntax error in line 34 of file xyz.c"
>
> too..

Both emacs and vi will display line numbers if you ask them.

Emacs has a really nice compile mode where it will compile in a second
window, and jump right to every line in the source files that caused
an error in sequence as you ask it. (It even accounts for line changes
because of edits.) BSD Unix has a command called "error" that does
something similar for you if you are using vi. (I don't know why it
doesn't seem to be in most Linuxes, but it is open source and trivially
ported.)

Thanks to such tools, no one with a real editor need ever find lines
with problems by hand, which means that although both editors will
show you line numbers, you don't really need them.


Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com