Re: Native display of line numbers

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Eli.

On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 18:12:00 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

[ .... ]

> 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.  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)
>   . it doesn't use the display margins
>   . it works with R2L text, something the old modes never did

> The main features of the line-numbering modes are all supported by
> this new feature.

> Please give it a try and report any bugs you find.  I'm sure there
> will be quite a few bugs, given the sheer amount of display feature
> which could be affected, and which I didn't have time to test.

There's one other thing which surprises me, and apologies if somebody
else has already mentioned it and I've missed that post.  At least on a
Linux tty, one character position is "wasted" to the left of the line
numbers.  Just about everything else I use in this tty environment,
including the command line, and the emacs master, starts with the first
character of a line bang up against the edge of the screen.  So why is
this extra space put in?  Might this be a case for a user option?

[ .... ]

> TIA

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).