Rubenerd

In my quest to finally give GNU Emacs a try, the first thing I encountered was a lack of line numbers. Easiest way to have them appear persistently is to add this to your ~/.emacs:

(global-linum-mode t)

Alternatively, you can load linum-mode at runtime:

M-x linum-mode

The EmacsWiki has a ridiculously exhaustive list of other options, including more Emacs lisp that I'd care to throw a stick at.