How to jump directly to a column number in Vim

The | command does what you want, as in 30| will take you to column 30.

                                                        bar
|                       To screen column [count] in the current line.
                        exclusive motion.  Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/motion.html#bar

You can use the cursor function. For example, to jump to column 25 of line 15, you can use :call cursor(15,25).