Navigating with ace-jump-mode

This is by way of an obvious Emacs tip. While I was in my emacs.el adding ace-windows, I decided to fix a problem with ace-jump-mode as well. When I first installed it I used【Ctrl+x Space】as the triggering key sequence. Somewhere along the line that got taken over by GUD so I changed it to 【Ctrl+c Space】 but that doesn’t work for Org files because it’s used to blank table fields so I needed a new binding. I chose 【Hyper+a】 because it easy to type and therefore fast. Once I got that taken care of I starting thinking about ace-jump-mode and realized that I could use it more widely than I’d been doing.

Mostly I was using it for micromovements and using isearch for larger movements as recommended by Steve Yegge but if the place you want to go is on the current page it’s a lot easier and faster to use ace-jump-mode. I just use the first letter of the word I want to go to as the jump target, pick the correct red letter, and I’m there. I could, I suppose, specify the universal argument to jump into the middle of a word but it doesn’t seem necessary.

I’ve been making an effort to follow this plan for a few days now and it’s working out very well. If you aren’t doing this, try it out. You might find yourself with a new habit.

This entry was posted in General and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.