GNU Emacs find-file to a specific line
May 26, 2022 18:17 · 132 words · 1 minute read
In GNU Emacs, there’s no way that I am aware of making “find-file” to open a buffer/file and go to a specific line number. With this useful advice, you can achieve this:
;; Open files and goto lines like we see from g++ etc. i.e. file:line#
;; (to-do "make `find-file-line-number' work for emacsclient as well")
;; (to-do "make `find-file-line-number' check if the file exists")
(defadvice find-file (around find-file-line-number
(filename &optional wildcards)
activate)
"Turn files like file.cpp:14 into file.cpp and going to the 14-th line."
(save-match-data
(let* ((matched (string-match "^\\(.*\\):\\([0-9]+\\):?$" filename))
(line-number (and matched
(match-string 2 filename)
(string-to-number (match-string 2 filename))))
(filename (if matched (match-string 1 filename) filename)))
ad-do-it
(when line-number
;; goto-line is for interactive use
(goto-char (point-min))
(forward-line (1- line-number))))))
Now, you can go to a function by “C-x C-f” “<file-name>:line-number”