total-lines

Keep track of a buffer's total number of lines.

total-lines-mode provides a variable, total-lines which holds the total number of lines in the current buffer at any given time. It's equivalent to %L in Vim's status line.

This mode requires GNU Emacs 24.3.

Installation

With use-package in your init file:

(use-package total-lines
  :ensure t
  :config (global-total-lines-mode))

Usage

You could display it in your modeline:

(setq-default mode-line-format
 `(; some
   ; other
   ; stuff
   ; the below will look like e.g. "263/947,10  26%"
   ((12 "%l" "/" (:eval (format "%d,%d" total-lines (1+ (current-column)))))
    (-3 "%p"))))

How it works

When enabled, the mode counts all current lines in the buffer and adds hooks to before-change-functions and after-change-functions to count any lines that are subsequently added or removed.

Performance is very good since it is proportional to the sizes of edits.

Caveats

This mode only keeps of track lines in the actual buffer text, which might differ from the displayed text when overlays are used (e.g. in a Magit buffer).

Emacs offers no hooks around changes to overlays, so newlines introduced by them cannot be reflected in the total-lines variable.

Support

You can ask a question in the issue tracker, or email me at hinrik.sig@gmail.com.

Contribute

Pull requests are welcome.

License

total-lines is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

total-lines is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

See COPYING for the complete license.

hinrik / total-lines