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By default, Emacs displays the current line number of the point
in the mode line. You can toggle this feature off or on with the
command M-x line-number-mode, or by setting the
variable line-number-mode. Note that Emacs will not
display the line number if the buffer's size in bytes is larger
than the value of the variable
line-number-display-limit.
You can similarly display the current column with M-x column-number-mode, or by putting the form
(setq column-number-mode t)
in your .emacs file. This feature is off by default.
The "%c" format specifier in the variable
mode-line-format will insert the current column's
value into the mode line. See the documentation for
mode-line-format (using C-h v mode-line-format
<RET>) for more information on how to set and use
this variable.
The ‘linum’ package (distributed with Emacs
since version 23.1) displays line numbers in the left margin,
like the “set number” capability of vi.
The packages ‘setnu’ and ‘wb-line-number’ (not distributed with
Emacs) also implement this feature.