Emacs: How to go to line N

Published on Feb 24, 2022, by Junji Zhi

When working on Emacs, we often need to move the cursor to certain line. This post explains how to do that in vanilla and Doom Emacs.

In Vi, you just type colon + number, like :14 to go to line 14.

Things in Emacs are more interesting.

In Vanilla Emacs, you can invoke the M-x, and then type out the command goto-line and enter a number for the line.

Or, you can use the shortcut: M-g g.

Doom Emacs keeps similar keybindings. If you type C-h k M-g g to describe the goto-line function, you see all the existing key bindings:

Key Bindings
esc-map g M-g
esc-map g g
global-map M-g M-g
global-map M-g g
goto-map M-g
goto-map g

Clearly Doom Emacs binds extra keys to be more tolerant of user errors, e.g., pressing the second g key while the meta key is not released yet.

In Mac OS X, I like to bind s-l to goto-line so that I can press command + l to do the same thing, instead of pressing the awkward combo of M-g g.

Edit:

Malcolm Purvis commented that we can use C-u <number> M-x goto-line to enter the line number first. That is a nicer workflow if you are comfortable with Emacs prefix arguments.