Cursor Position Information
Here are commands to get information about the size and position of
parts of the buffer, and to count lines.
- M-x what-page
- Display the page number of point, and the line number within the page.
- M-x what-line
- Display the line number of point in the buffer.
- M-x line-number-mode
- M-x column-number-mode
- Toggle automatic display of current line number or column number.
See Optional Mode Line.
- M-=
- Display the number of lines in the current region (
count-lines-region).
See Mark, for information about the region.
- C-x =
- Display the character code of character after point, character position of
point, and column of point (
what-cursor-position).
- M-x hl-line-mode
- Enable or disable highlighting of the current line. See Cursor Display.
There are two commands for working with line numbers. M-x
what-line computes the current line number and displays it in the echo
area. To go to a given line by number, use M-x goto-line; it
prompts you for the number. These line numbers count from one at the
beginning of the buffer.
You can also see the current line number in the mode line; see Mode Line. If you narrow the buffer, then the line number in the mode line
is relative to the accessible portion (see Narrowing). By contrast,
what-line shows both the line number relative to the narrowed
region and the line number relative to the whole buffer.
M-x what-page counts pages from the beginning of the file, and
counts lines within the page, showing both numbers in the echo area.
See Pages.
While on this subject, we might as well mention M-= (count-lines-region),
which displays the number of lines in the region (see Mark).
See Pages, for the command C-x l which counts the lines in the
current page.
The command C-x = (what-cursor-position) can be used to find out
the column that the cursor is in, and other miscellaneous information about
point. It displays a line in the echo area that looks like this:
Char: c (0143, 99, 0x63) point=21044 of 26883(78%) column 53
(In fact, this is the output produced when point is before the
column in the example.)
The four values after Char: describe the character that follows
point, first by showing it and then by giving its character code in
octal, decimal and hex. For a non-ASCII multibyte character, these are
followed by ext and the character's representation, in hex, in
the buffer's coding system, if that coding system encodes the character
safely and with a single byte (see Coding Systems). If the
character's encoding is longer than one byte, Emacs shows ext ....
point= is followed by the position of point expressed as a character
count. The front of the buffer counts as position 1, one character later
as 2, and so on. The next, larger, number is the total number of characters
in the buffer. Afterward in parentheses comes the position expressed as a
percentage of the total size.
column is followed by the horizontal position of point, in
columns from the left edge of the window.
If the buffer has been narrowed, making some of the text at the
beginning and the end temporarily inaccessible, C-x = displays
additional text describing the currently accessible range. For example, it
might display this:
Char: C (0103, 67, 0x43) point=252 of 889(28%) <231 - 599> column 0
where the two extra numbers give the smallest and largest character
position that point is allowed to assume. The characters between those
two positions are the accessible ones. See Narrowing.
If point is at the end of the buffer (or the end of the accessible
part), the C-x = output does not describe a character after
point. The output might look like this:
point=26957 of 26956(100%) column 0
C-u C-x = displays additional information about a character,
in place of the buffer coordinates and column: the character set name
and the codes that identify the character within that character set;
ASCII characters are identified as belonging to the ASCII
character set. In addition, the full character encoding, even if it
takes more than a single byte, is shown after ext. Here's an
example for a Latin-1 character A with a grave accent in a buffer whose
coding system is iso-2022-7bit1:
Char: À (04300, 2240, 0x8c0, ext ESC , A @) (latin-iso8859-1 64)
In addition, C-u C-x = shows the font used to display the
character (if the terminal supports more than one font).
Footnotes
-
On terminals that support
Latin-1 characters, the character shown after Char: is displayed
as the actual glyph of A with grave accent.
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