Is there a way to change the delimiter after linenumber in vim?

Question

When I ':set number' in vim, each line has a line number followed by a space followed by the content of that line. Is there a way to replace the space with something else? For example a '|' or a couple of extra spaces would be neat, wouldn't it?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is not possible. The line number is printed in Vim's screen.c, line 2322:

sprintf((char *)buf, "%*ld ", w, num);

(w is the width and num is the line number). The only way you could change this would be to edit the source code and recompile Vim.