Are
you sure you indeed need to go to a line by its number? Perhaps
all you want is to display a line in your source file for which a
compiler printed an error message? If so, compiling from within
Emacs using the M-x compile and M-x
recompile commands is a much more effective way of doing
that. Emacs automatically intercepts the compile error messages,
inserts them into a special buffer called
*compilation*, and lets you visit the locus of each
message in the source. Type C-x ` to step through the
offending lines one by one (starting with Emacs 22, you can also
use M-g M-p and M-g M-n to go to the
previous and next matches directly). Click Mouse-2 or
press <RET> on a message text in the
*compilation* buffer to go to the line whose number
is mentioned in that message.
But if you indeed need to go to a certain text line, type
M-g M-g (which is the default binding of the
goto-line function starting with Emacs 22). Emacs
will prompt you for the number of the line and go to that
line.
You can do this faster by invoking goto-line with
a numeric argument that is the line's number. For example,
C-u 286 M-g M-g will jump to line number 286 in the
current buffer.