How to show the current column in the statusbar in vim?

Question

I would like to show the current column in the statusbar, as is common in many other text editors. E.g. it's good to know if you are around column 80 or above.

How to show the current column in the statusbar?

Answer 1

Try if setting 'ruler' option is what you are looking for. On my computer at the bottom right shows the line and column where I have the cursor.

:set ruler

EDIT TO COMMENTS:

From the help of vim (command :help ruler):

If the number of characters displayed is different from the number of bytes in the text (e.g., for a TAB or a multi-byte character), both the text column (byte number) and the screen column are shown, separated with a dash.

You can try changing it with rulerformat option, like :set rulerformat=%l,%v

Answer 2

See :help statusline for the many options available.

I have this in my ~/.vimrc in between a bunch of other directives:

set statusline+=col:\ %c,

which outputs

col: 64

in my statusline.

I don't have set ruler.

Answer 3

Another way to do this is to do 'g Ctrl-G', which prints the current position of the cursor in five ways: Column, Line, Word, Character and Byte. (from http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/editing.html#g_CTRL-G)

Answer 4

I would depreciate using set ruler because I believe it is not compatible with the statusline options, e.g. if you set the statusline to display the full filepath in combination with set ruler

set statusline+=%F

set ruler

Then it does NOT display the column number but just the full filepath in the statusbar. However if you put the following in your .vimrc

set statusline+=%F\ %l\:%c

It will display everything correctly, namely the

[Filepath/filename] [linenumber]:[column number]

Answer 5

Or, leave 'ruler' unset, a performance gain, and press CTRL-G when you want to see the current column.

Answer 6

For the other people that are looking for this answer and are not used to working with VIm, personally the simplest answer I've found is to add this line to the end of your .vimrc file in your home directory:

set ruler

Answer 7

For permanent change you can just do:

echo "set ruler" >> ~/.vimrc

Answer 8

If you want to see the line number and then column, you can use the statusline option like so:

:set statusline=\ %l,%c

This will make the line above the command and text entry show a set of coordinates, ROW/LINE, COLUMN, or 58,12. If you have colors turned on, it will be highlighted in light blue directly above where you typed this command.

I hope that helps someone in the future.