Very sorry, my mistake. I thought I had checked and confirm that it did appear to the right and I must have looked too quickly. No, I don't think there is a way to swap those columns. (At least not through Vim 7.2, Vim 7.3 introduced relative line numbering and maybe it has a teak in addition to that -- but I doubt it.) It's not too hard to adjust line indenting so it defaults to minimum that is greater than 1, say 2 or 3, but that would be sort of an ugly hack, inserting blank spaces into your document for mere purpose of viewing more space between line column and text.