Re: Suggestion: Mapping of M-g should be goto-line

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Or, perhaps, it's just that there are not alternatives for a simple
>> task: going to a line. Not an error line, not a line containing some
>> text, just to the line numbered X. 

> M-x 123 RET

> Argh -- that cannot be done in lisp :-(

Of course it can be.  M-x right now is written in C, but it's pretty easy
to rewrite it in Lisp (without any changes to the C code).

Along the same lines, I presonally use C-s 123 (which gives me incremental
line number search, not that the incremental nature of it is a feature in
this case, more like a side effect of hooking into isearch).

Obviously I agree that goto-line is a common need since I went to the
trouble of writing my C-s hack to do the equivalent.  Before that I had
M-g bound to goto-line but my fingers often instinctively hit C-s when
I was "searching for line number 123", so I figured I should adapt Emacs
to my fingers rather than the other way around.

In my book the default M-g bindings are "never used other than to test
whether they still work".  Especially since the `face' part of it (arguably
the main part) simply doesn't work in any buffer that uses font-lock.


        Stefan