Re: goto-line trouble with narrowing

[Kevin Rodgers]

Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     The defun for `goto-line' in emacs/lisp/simple.el specifically calls
>
>         (widen)
>
>     on the buffer before moving to the specified line number.  I don't
>     know whether this is intended.
>
> That line wasn't written by accident!

Perhaps the doc string should be changed from:
"Goto line ARG, counting from line 1 at beginning of buffer."

to:
"Goto line ARG, counting from line 1 at beginning of widened buffer."

> 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.  For goto-line to use a narrowed
> line number would hardly ever be useful.

I sometimes would like to be able to do that, as when working
in a narrowed buffer visiting a very large file that I pipe into
a shell command that reports line numbers (e.g. C-x h M-| grep -n foo).

goto-line already takes a prefix arg to mean a different buffer,
which is useful in the resulting *Shell Command Output* buffer, so I
guess I need to roll my own goto-line-in-narrowed-buffer command that
just omits the call to (widen).  :-(

--
Kevin Rodgers