Technovangelism

One of the most used features of an IDE or a text editor, whether you realize you are using it or not, is the line numbers. When compiling, how do you know where to find the mistake you made when the compiler didn’t succeed? When debugging, how do you find exactly where an exception was thrown?

Line numbers are a valuable, time-saving feature of an IDE, yet, they are so rarely turned on by default. Remember the last time you installed Visual Studio, or any other text editor/IDE for that matter, and when coding your first project, you wanted to see which line you were on? Without cheating, what is the process for turning on line numbers? If the process isn’t, “Nothing. Line numbers are already turned on,” your editor is doing it wrong.

Why must developers, designers, anyone, go through so much work to see something that should be there by default? Some IDEs, like Netbeans, make it a little easier to turn on line numbers; the option is in the highest level of the View menu. But why does Visual Studio tuck this option away? It doesn’t just tuck it away, it makes you come back for each langauge you are writing in. Finally figured out how to turn on line numbers in C#? Now go figure out how to do it again when you open a XAML file.

Perhaps the only developers who don’t appreciate line numbers are the developers of IDEs. Or perhaps they haven’t learned to eat their own dog food.