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Comment by renox | Hacker News Reader

I still wonder why editors don't understand line numbers on the CLI <editor> file:5

The editor should try to find if 'file:5' exist and open it if so, if it doesn't it should try to open 'foo' and then go to line 5.

Sounds sensible no? But I don't know any editor which does this.

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> The editor should try to find if 'file:5' exist and open it if so, if it doesn't it should try to open 'foo' and then go to line 5.

Opening a file is often done in creation, and `file:5` is a perfectly valid filename, so it's a bit debatable for a default.

OTOH in Emacs you should be able to define a find-file-not-found-functions hook[0] and implement whatever fallback you want. I assume `emacs <file>` calls `find-file` after it's initialised the editor itself.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Vi...

> Opening a file is often done in creation, and `file:5` is a perfectly valid filename, so it's a bit debatable for a default.

It gets even more fun on Windows! Giving a filename of `foo:5` can result in a file called `foo` with an alternate datastream called `5`.

> Opening a file is often done in creation, and `file:5` is a perfectly valid filename, so it's a bit debatable for a default

You're right, but even as an option I think it'd be nice.

Visual Studio Code does this (see "File links"): <https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/basics#_links>

I don't think it works from the CLI: code <file>:5 doesn't do what's expected.

You have to use the `-g` command line option: `code -g <file>:<line>`

Thanks I didn't know this.

huge, tysm

That works in Emacs compilation buffers. You can also define custom patterns to match the output formats of different compilers.

It works with kwrite/kate/kdevelop.

JetBrains products do this for lots of stuff if you use the built in terminal to launch stuff or their runner.

vim does:

    vim file +5

But compiler error messages are file:5 so this isn't good enough.

That's why you have `:make` which uses `errorfmt` to populate your quickfix list, which is covered in the help `:h make`

I'm not sure if you're joking or not but if you're not: I usually don't call the compiler from my vim session..

Right but if you want to edit and fix files that failed compilation, using `:make` and the quickfix list is the vim way of doing it

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