A useful but underused Emacs facility is narrowing. The idea is that you can limit the visibility of a buffer’s text to a region, function, or an Org mode subtree. The rest of the buffer is still there but you can’t see or access it. The operations are pretty simple but still seem hard to remember for many people.
Over at Emacs Elements Channel there’s a new video on narrowing and how to use it. As I said, it’s really pretty simple despite the problem some folks have with remembering the keystrokes. The biggest problem is widening or undoing a narrowing. I don’t understand these problems even though I had them myself.
Artur Malabarba to the rescue. In his now, sadly, abandoned site, Endless Parentheses, he presents the narrow-or-widen-dwim function that makes using narrowing trivial. If you call it and the narrowing is already in effect, it widens the narrowed text. Otherwise it narrows to the proper text given the context. As I say in the above post, I don’t think I’ve called any of the narrowing functions directly since I installed it. Like Malabarba, I put it in my “toggle” key map so it’s easy to remember and use.
The video is only 6 minutes, 12 seconds long so it should be easy to watch. After you do, be sure to check out Malabarba’s function. It will make using narrowing easy. I installed it 9 years ago and haven’t used anything else for narrowing since.