Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has another great video out. This one is about marks, bookmarks, and registers. You can probably guess from the title that the video is mainly about ways of moving around in a file or files efficiently.
He starts by making the obvious but often overlooked point (heh!) that the mark is really the last place the point (or cursor) was. That’s not literally true, of course. If you move the cursor left or right or up and down a line, you won’t affect the mark but any “big” movement sets the mark to where the point was before the movement.
He moves on to the usual marking of regions but along the way he does an excellent job in explaining the use and value of Ctrl+x Ctrl+x. In the past, I hardly ever used it because I didn’t understand its use cases very well. After watching this video I’ll definitely be using it more often. While discussing marks, he also describes how to use them to remember locations.
Then he moves on to remembering locations by storing them in registers. It’s a more deliberate way of remembering a location than by storing a mark. When you want to jump to a location stored in a register, you’re given a nice list of the registers to help you remember which register is storing your desired destination.
Finally, Prot considers bookmarks. They’re sort of like storing a location in a register but they’re persistent. As with registers, you get a listing of the available bookmarks when you’re ready to visit one.
Prot ends the video with a bit of configuration that you may find useful. The video is 35 minutes, 33 seconds long you’ll have to schedule some time but it’s well worth your time. Even if you’re an experienced Emacs user, you may learn a few new things.