Emacs line no. in status bar set to '??'

Question

I am having an issue in emacs (24) where occasionally the line no. in the status bar gets set to ??, e.g.

U:---   filename   All   (1000, 4)    (Conf[Unix])

switches to:

U:---   filename   All   (??, 4)    (Conf[Unix])

its a bit irritating and something I'd like to be able to prevent

Dint

as an aside - how do you get 2 question marks (on their own) in a question title? it beats me! – Dint

Answer 1

From the emacs documentation for line-number-mode:

"Line numbers do not appear for very large buffers and buffers with very long lines; see variables line-number-display-limit and line-number-display-limit-width."

If you set line-number-display-limit to nil, you should always see a line number.

Dwan

well spotted, it does seem to occur when files get big - either length or width ways.. – Dint

Those limits are undoubtedly a performance measure, so you might not want to enforce this unnecessarily. – Deice

@Deice yep, I have it set no nil and sometimes when viewing large files I have to wait for it to calculate the line number. I don't mind that though :) – Dwan

possibly the use of linum-mode is more efficient for large files? I thought in some cases that this fix hadn't worked but I think I was just experiencing the latency mentioned due to the large file sizes i was dealing with – Dint