How to Enable & Disable Line Numbers in Vim

Vim is a popular text editor in Linux used for coding as well as text editing. Often you may need to use line numbers in your document, while using Vim editor. It is useful for debugging issues as well as improving overall readability, for developers, system administrators and general users. In this article, we will learn how to enable & disable line numbers in vi/vim on Linux systems.

How to Enable & Disable Line Numbers in Vim

Here are the steps to show or hide line numbers in Vim.

Enable Line Numbers in Vim

First press Esc key. Then press colon(:) key followed by any of the following commands, to enable line numbers.

set number
OR
set nu

The above commands will display absolute line numbers with the topmost line having line number as 1. You may also display relative line numbers where the first line is the line where your cursor is presently located, numbered as 0. The line above as well as below are numbered as 1. The lines below and above these two lines are numbered as 2 and so on. In relative numbering, sequential numbers are assigned both upwards as well as downwards, starting from your present line.

Here is the command to enable relative numbering. Please note, relative numbering is available only in vim editor and not vi editor.

set relativenumber
OR
set rnu

Disable Line Numbers in Vim

If you want to disable line numbers in vim editor, press Esc key, followed by colon (:) key. Enter any of the following commands to disable line numbers in Vim.

set nu!

OR
set nonumber

If you want to turn off relative numbering, enter the following commands.

set norelativenumber

OR
set nornu

Permanently Enable or Disable Line Numbers in Vim

The above commands and approach will enable or disable line numbering only as long as you are within vim editor. Once you exit the editor, all these changes will be reverted back to their default settings. If you need to use line numbers every time in vi/vim, you need to add these settings in its configuration file.

Open its configuration file in text editor.

$ vi ~/.vimrc

Add the following line to enable line numbers.

set number

On the other hand, add the following line to disable line numbers.

set nonumber

Save and close the file to apply changes. Sometimes you may need to start a new session to apply changes.

You can also set the minimum number of columns to be used for displaying numbers, using numberwidth variable.

set numberwidth=1
set numberwidth=4
set numberwidth=2

The minimum value of above variable is 1 and its maximum value is 10.

If you want to directly open a file in vi/vim editor at a specific line number then use the following syntax.

$ vi +linenumber filename

Here is an example to open file data.txt at line 100 in vi/vim editor.

$ vi +100 data.txt

In this article, we have learnt how to display & hide line numbers in vi/vim editor.

How to Enable & Disable Line Numbers in Vim