Re: Newbie: Interactive goto-line ?!

[Dan Katz]

On 25 Feb 2004, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I was serious.  If you have serious counter-arguments why goto-line
> is better then "C-x `" and its ilk, please tell.
>
> In a nutshell, the reason why goto-line should not be a frequently
> used command is that normally there's no reason to want to get to
> line number N unless you have a program that told you there's
> something interesting on that line.

Or someone else told you so, perhaps.  I work in an environment where
we have several people in an open environment working in the same code
base, each at their own computer.  It rather frequently happens that
someone in the area will make a request like "can you tell me what's
going on at line 356 of foobar.c" at which point goto-line is rather
useful, and useful frequently enough that I've bound goto-line to
"M-g" from time to time.

Note that I'm not advocating for changing the default binding of "M-g"
and that I'm not saying that goto-line is better than the "C-x `"
mechanism in cases where the latter is applicable.  I simply wanted to
point out an environment in which goto-line is useful enough to
warrant being bound to a simple key-chord.  

Of course, since it's emacs I can do all this rebinding myself without
bothering the maintainers... :-) 

But the newbies the OP is worried about might have a harder time,
perhaps.


Dan