I have used vi editor several times on many different machines, but I have never seen such an behavior of set nu option.
This is what my vi editor looks after I set the set nu option in .vimrc file in my home directory:
As clearly seen, some amount of whitespace is being created to the left of line numbers. How can I remove this space so that I can better make use of my workspace.
Thanks in advance.
From the help on nu (:h 'number')
'number' 'nu' 'nonumber' 'nonu'
'number' 'nu' boolean (default off)
local to window
Print the line number in front of each line. When the 'n' option is
excluded from 'cpoptions' a wrapped line will not use the column of
line numbers (this is the default when 'compatible' isn't set).
The 'numberwidth' option can be used to set the room used for the line
number.
And in turn, from :h 'numberwidth':
'numberwidth' 'nuw' number (Vim default: 4 Vi default: 8)
local to window
{not in Vi}
{only available when compiled with the +linebreak
feature}
Minimal number of columns to use for the line number. Only relevant
when the 'number' or 'relativenumber' option is set or printing lines
with a line number. Since one space is always between the number and
the text, there is one less character for the number itself.
The value is the minimum width. A bigger width is used when needed to
fit the highest line number in the buffer respectively the number of
rows in the window, depending on whether 'number' or 'relativenumber'
is set. Thus with the Vim default of 4 there is room for a line number
up to 999. When the buffer has 1000 lines five columns will be used.
The minimum value is 1, the maximum value is 10.
NOTE: 'numberwidth' is reset to 8 when 'compatible' is set.
That is, the default width is 4, but 8 when in compatible mode. vi in default Ubuntu is vim.tiny, which doesn't support nocompatible, so the width became 8. You need to install vim to get the normal behaviour.
That said, if you do wish to set a different minimum width, say 2, just do:
set nuw=2
