How do I know what COLUMN my cursor is at in Xcode?

Solution 1:

Open Xcode's Preferences, go to the Text Editing tab, Editing subtab, and check the "Page guide at column: 80" box. That will display a vertical line at 80 columns in the editor.

Solution 2:

EDIT Oct 6, 2021:

Holy moly. Xcode 13 now shows both the line and column number in the IDE! It took ten years but Apple listened.

Original Post:

If you find this post, please log in to the Apple Bug Reporter site and report this as a bug against the Xcode developer tool. Mention that Xcode needs to provide an option to display the cursor column position and that the page guide is insufficient. Apple should mark it as a duplicate request of bug #8315595.

The more requests they get the greater the likelihood they'll repair it and this is a very useful feature for many developers.

Solution 3:

Turns out as for now (Xcode 4.3.2), it can't be done.

My solution was eventually moving to AppCode :)