Gaurab Paul has a nice post on improving your Emacs workflow with selection and navigation. He says the post is aimed mainly at Emacs immigrants from “other, so called ‘modern’ editors” but he discusses some techniques that even more experienced Emacsers may find useful.
For example, if you are going to repeat a certain bit of text in the sequel, it makes sense to first set the mark, then type the text, and then copy the text to the kill ring with Meta+w. Then when you want additional instances of the text, you can merely paste it in with Ctrl+y or Meta+y depending on what’s happened in the meantime.
He also discusses navigation and some of the Avy and Helm packages that make it easier. As regular readers know, I’m all in on Avy commands such as avy-goto-word-1 that allow me to quickly navigate to my desired location by picking the right candidate from all the words that begin with a particular character. Paul discusses a few other navigation techniques as well.
If you’re a n00b, you should definitely read this post. Even if you’re a bit more seasoned, you may learn some tricks to improve your workflow.