Emacs Vertical Indicator at the 50th column (2025-01-26)

We here at the PluraList really enjoy Emacs for various tasks. Most of our work is done in text. And despite the fact that many of our monitors are quite wide we prefer the text to be no more than 50 characters wide.

And so to help with this we utilize a 50th column indicator in Emacs. To add such vertical indicator at the 50th column in Emacs, we utilize the built-in display-fill-column-indicator-mode available in Emacs 27 and later. Here’s how we set it up (source: Emacs Stack Exchange)

  1. Enable the Mode:
  • To activate the indicator in the current buffer, run:​
M-x display-fill-column-indicator-mode
  • To enable it globally across all buffers, add the following line to your Emacs initialization file (.emacs or init.el):​
(global-display-fill-column-indicator-mode)
  1. Set the Indicator Column:
  • By default, the indicator aligns with the fill-column value, which is typically set to 70. To change this to the 50th column, add this to your initialization file:​
(setq-default display-fill-column-indicator-column 50)