Exploring Line Numbers in Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a highly advanced integrated development environment (IDE) that is widely used by developers from all over the world to create diverse applications, including mobile, desktop, and web applications. It is an excellent tool that comes with many features and tools to make coding easier and faster. One of the helpful features offered by Visual Studio is the ability to display line numbers in the editor. Line numbers provide a quick reference while coding because they allow developers to quickly navigate to a specific line in their code.

Displaying Line Numbers in Visual Studio 2019

Step 1: Open Visual Studio 2019

Firstly, launch Visual Studio 2019 on your PC, and a welcome page appears on the IDE.

Step 2: Open a New or Existing Project

Create a new project or open an existing one to get started with coding.

Step 3: Show Separator Line and Line Numbers

Now navigate to Tools from the menu bar and select Options from the drop-down menu, which will open the Options window. Once inside this window, expand the Text Editor dropdown and select the language you are coding in, such as C#. Then, expand the General option, and check the boxes for “Show line numbers” and “Show documents tabs in separate lines” as shown in the image below. Finally, hit the “okay” button to save the changes.

Step 4: Verify that the Line Numbers are Displayed

The line numbers should now appear on the left side of the editor, allowing you to navigate and edit code more efficiently.

Displaying Line Numbers in Visual Studio Code

Step 1: Open Visual Studio Code

Another highly advanced version of Visual Studio, known as Visual Studio Code, also offers various features and tools to make coding faster and easier. Launch Visual Studio Code on your PC to begin.

Step 2: Open a New or Existing Project

Create a new project or open an existing one to start coding.

Step 3: Display Line Numbers

In Visual Studio Code, navigate to the View option from the menu bar and select Toggle Line Numbers from the dropdown menu. Alternatively, you can use the shortcut key “Ctrl+Shift+P” on a Windows machine or “Command+Shift+P” on a Mac to quickly find and execute the Toggle Line Numbers command. The line numbers will now appear on the left side of the editor, allowing you to navigate and edit your code more efficiently.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, Visual Studio is an essential tool for coding that comes with a wide range of features to improve productivity and speed up the coding process. Displaying line numbers is amongst such features that help developers navigate and edit their code more efficiently. In this article, we’ve explained how to turn on line numbers in Visual Studio, both in Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code. We hope this tutorial has been helpful to you and you can use this feature to increase your coding productivity.