Go to Nth character in the file?

Question

:goto goes to Nth byte of the file. I am looking for a way to go to Nth character. Given that Vim supports all kinds of multi-byte encodings, it would be odd if it did not exist, but I can't find one.

Answer 1

Excluding newlines

There is a command for go to next character, it is <space>. I assume the option whichwrap is default of b,s so that space wraps to the next line, and conceallevel is 0 so no chars are skipped. Then to go to the 1723rd character in the file, use

:normal! 0go1722 "

" simply emphasizes the trailing space. We can make a command wrapper as follows:

:command! -nargs=1 GoToChar execute 'normal! 0go' . (<args>-1) . ' '

Use like :GoToChar 1723

Including newlines

An alternative is to use a pattern which consumes characters from the start of the file

/\%^\_.\{1723}/e

In this case, end-of-line is counted.