Vi and Vim are popular text editors used by programmers and developers around the world. They are powerful tools for editing and manipulating text, but they can be a bit intimidating for beginners. One essential feature of any text editor is the ability to display line numbers, and this tutorial will show how to easily do this in Vi and Vim.

Vi and Vim are similar editors, but Vim is an improved version of Vi with more advanced features. Both have a command mode that allows users to enter commands and a text mode for entering and editing text. The first step in enabling line numbers is to enter the command mode by pressing the Esc key, followed by a colon ‘:’.

To display line numbers in Vi, type the command ‘set number’ and press Enter. This will display the line numbers on the left-hand side of the screen. The line numbers will be displayed in white on a dark background by default, which can be changed by customizing the settings in the .vimrc file.

In Vim, the command is similar but with a slight change. Type the command ‘set number’ and press Enter, and this will show the line numbers on the left-hand side of the screen. To turn off line numbers, enter the command ‘set nonumber’ and press Enter.

If you want to display the current line number, you can use the ‘=’ command in both Vi and Vim. While in command mode, type ‘=’ and then press Enter. This will show you the current line number at the bottom of the screen.

Users can also navigate directly to a particular line number by entering the command mode and then typing the line number, followed by a colon ‘:’ and pressing Enter. For example, typing ‘42:’ will take users directly to line 42.