Jumping to a specific line of code

One feature of code editors that I ignored for a long long time is the ability to jump to a specific line number in a current file or to open a file on a specific line of code.

The need to go to a particular line of code is quite common, for example to investigate a printed stack trace in a terminal. Let’s consider for a moment that we have a simple Python stack trace available and want to investigate the executed code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/pstribny/playground/linenumbers/linenumbers.py", line 5, in <module>
    raise_exception()
  File "/home/pstribny/playground/linenumbers/linenumbers.py", line 2, in raise_exception
    raise ValueError()
ValueError

You can see that we get information about both file locations and line numbers.

In Visual Studio Code, we can open files with fuzzy search using CTRL + P. It is possible to also add a line number to the search by separating the file name and the line number by a colon. The final syntax would be “file:linenumber”, e.g. “file.py:2” to go to the second line of file.py.

Using file search (CTRL+P) in VSCode to go to a specific line

In case the file in question is open already, we can specify just a line number to go to. To do that, just leave out the file part and use a colon with a number like :54. There is also a direct shortcut CTRL + G. VSCode even supports going to a specific character on the line by appending another colon with a number, if you need that.

While going to a specific line is useful on its own, Visual Studio Code makes it even simpler to jump to file locations from the integrated terminal. When getting terminal output with a stack trace, it is possible to just CTRL + click on the printed locations (see the underline):

This is not true only for various stack traces (check if your language is supported), but for file locations in general. That means we can print file locations in a console ourselves and get the ability to jump to code files that we want!

Let’s say we print something like this to the console:

print("/home/pstribny/playground/linenumbers/linenumbers.py:8:3")

VSCode will recognize the syntax and allows us to jump to linenumbers.py, on line 8, and character number 3.

---

I am not the same person I was 10 years ago, now I often jump to specific lines of code. And you?

Petr