Re: goto-line trouble with narrowing

[Robert J. Chassell]

        The defun for `goto-line' in emacs/lisp/simple.el specifically calls
            (widen) ...

    That line wasn't written by accident!

    The most common use of goto-line is to go to a line number that
    you got from some other program.  That program normally operates
    on the whole file.

That is a good argument.

In  @node Optional Mode Line   in   emacs/man/display.texi
after the sentence that says,

      If you have narrowed the buffer (@pxref{Narrowing}), the size of the
    accessible part of the buffer is shown.

I recommend adding two sentences such as the following:

    Since the current line number function counts only in the
    accessible part of the buffer, it may not provide useful
    information for a command that moves dot to a line counted from
    the non-narrowed beginning, such as @code{goto-line}.  (The
    @code{what-line} command provides both counts.)

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         
    address@hidden                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc