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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

I know some people like line numbers, but personally, I just look at the status bar at the bottom of the buffer.

I find line numbers on the side clutter up my view too much. I always use 80 character terminal widths, to make it easier to stick to my PEP8 validation script we run.

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That's fine for determining what line you're on, but visible line numbers make it much easier to jump to a particular line. I've only recently set number in my .vimrc and wish I'd have done it sooner.

I do that by jumping to the particular line. :<linenum> or <linenum>G does that.

I think the point is that it's harder to see what line number you want to jump to if you don't have line numbering on. . . .

Right, the alternative is to just sort of guess how much you need to ctrl-u/d or j and k to get to a specific line. Also, I guess it depends on screen size. I usually have plenty so the line numbers' usefulness outweighs the extra space required, at least for me.

Yes, that's exactly my point

Yes, that's how we all jump to a particular line :) It's just easier to target a specific line when numbering is turned on, as hesitz said.

They also make it much easier to find the line number named in an exception backtrace. :)

Do you use (){}[] and others to move about? I rarely need to know the line number to move to on the screen.

That only really works well if the line you want is visible.

I've found searching to be much quicker, since I know class/method/variable names more than I know line numbers - we follow reasonably standard names for things in the projects we work on.

I just tried turning off line numbers, and you're right, it's great. They really don't provide enough value to justify taking 4 columns on every vertical split.

I use a pretty large font size for my terminal, and the extra 8 columns finally allows for two 80 column vertical splits on my laptop. Thanks for the suggestion!

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