Q: Toggle line numbers on and off while viewing - is it possible? [ANSWER: not right now]

[HenrikBengtsson]

Question

Is it possible to toggle line numbers on and off while viewing a file? (This would be useful if you ever need to cut'n'paste a few lines from a file)

Here is what I've tried

Entering -p

Given that

bat -p README.md

suppresses line numbers, I though entering -p would toggle them, but instead I get an error:

Cannot change the -p (--pattern) option  (press ENTER)

Looks like CLI option -p is overridden by an in-viewer option.

Entering -n or -N

I view a file with:

bat README.md

which decorates each line with a line number. Then, when I type -n, while viewing, there is a message saying:

Don't use line numbers  (press ENTER)

Here, I expect/hope that bat would re-render the file and display the file without line numbers. FWIW, if I type -n again, then it says:

Use line numbers  (press ENTER)

Entering -n will keep switching between these two messages, but there is no visual difference AFAICT.

I also tried -N, but no effect.

Session info

$ bat --version
bat 0.22.1 (e5d9579)
henrik@hb-x1-2023:~/repositories/ansible-hb-x1-20

[thexeromin]

Currently, there is no way to toggle line numbers.

[thexeromin]

@sharkdp I would love to add a PR for this. Should I?

[keith-hall]

See also #1053

[sharkdp]

@sharkdp I would love to add a PR for this. Should I?

I don't think it's possible to implement this right now without fundamentally changing how we interact with the pager. As @keith-hall mentioned, please see #1053.

[sharkdp]

This is also related to #1177. Closing for now.

[HenrikBengtsson]

Thanks for the quick comments and answers