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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T20:17:20+00:00

I get this graphical error with linum-mode in my Emacs. I tried upgrading from

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I get this graphical error with linum-mode in my Emacs. I tried upgrading from 23 to 24 (via git) and I’ve tried both with various supplied binaries online and with my home-compiled version. What I’m really interested in is where to start diagnosing the problem.

"Tearing" of numbers in linum-mode

The problem goes away if I scroll the torn line numbers off screen and back in.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I have experienced the same problem and spent quite some time trying to resolve it. The graphical error is a result of a clash between linum-mode and how the fringe is rendered. Unfortunately, I was unable to resolve the problem in linum.el, and the fringe display code is part of the C-source.

    It can still be done! The easiest way to fix it is to just turn off the fringe.

    M-x fringe-mode RET none RET

    To make the fringe permanently stay off, I recommend customizing the settings with M-x customize-group RET fringe because some compiled versions of Emacs for Mac OS X have their own fringe settings that can override parts of your .emacs file.

    I don’t really need those line wrap indicators, so not having a fringe doesn’t bother me. However, I did miss a slight separation between the line numbers and the buffer text. I followed the advice of a post on the Emacs Wiki to get that spacing back. In version 0.9x of linum, change line 160 from

    (setq width (max width (length str)))

    to

    (setq width (max width (+ (length str) 1)))

    The inspiration for this change is here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LineNumbers

    There are arguments at the source link to set the linum-format variable instead of modifying linum.el. While I understand where they are coming from, most color-themes these days would color the extra space and not provide what I am looking for (a separation of about a space that is the background color). If you do edit linum.el, make sure to run

    M-x emacs-lisp-byte-compile-and-load

    to make the changes persistent. You can see the result of this by looking at the space before the cursor in the picture found here: https://i.stack.imgur.com/TxyMr.png (I don’t have enough reputation to embed images).

    No more graphical artifacts!

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