I do much like Sage described but I learned a way to avoid the circles. You can use dynamic input to see the length of the line segment. Before dynamic input I used the cursor coordinate values that are displayed on the status bar. You may have to click on the coordinate box on the status bar to change the display to relative coordinates.
Jeff Paulsen
Civil 3D 2020.4 | Win 10 Pro N 64-bit
Xeon W-2223 @ 3.60GHz, 32GB Ram | NVidia Quadro P2200