Nano Show Line Numbers

The Nano Editor is the most famous text editor for the console after vi/vim. What makes it popular is the ease of use.

By default you will not see a gutter area with line numbers when you open a file with Nano, there are multiple ways in which we can enable line numbers in Nano, let's take a look at a few of them.

Using the --linenumbers or -l flag

When you open a file, just add --linenumbers to it.

nano --linenumbers datafile.txt

or,

nano -l datafile.txt

Toggle Line Numbers

If you have already opened a file using nano, and you want to display the line numbers, then you can toggle line numbers as follows,

On macOS

 Esc + n

On Windows

Alt + Shift + 3

Alt + #