Charles Choi has a new post that considers Emacs bookmarks. His idea is to make Emacs bookmarks as similar as possible to browser bookmarks. That makes sense and, I’m sure, works for lots of folks but I’ve gone in a completely different direction. My main objection to Choi’s method is that he uses a menu to access the bookmarks. Despite our detente1 on using proportional fonts for writing prose, we will probably never agree on the use of the mouse in Emacs. I consider every use of the mouse in Emacs a fail and go to significant effort to avoid it.
Choi is absolutely right that the default keybindings for dealing with bookmarks are obscure and hard to remember. I solved that with a hydra mostly stolen from abo-abo. You can read about it at the link but the TL;DR is that it gives me a fast and easy way to jump to a bookmark. That and the use of headlong-bookmark-jump makes opening a bookmark trivial.
That doesn’t address the other bookmark operations, of course, but I very rarely use them. When I do, I simply type Ctrl+x r (that much I can remember) and let the excellent whick-key tell me the correct suffix.
Finally, as suggested by Choi, I do use Bookmark+. I like it because it allows me to bookmark things other than files. For example, one of my bookmarks is to Irreal. When I invoke it, focus jumps to my browser and opens the Irreal site. It’s a real time saver and I use this all the time.
Take a look at Choi’s post. He’s got a lot of good ideas and you may find some you want to steal.
Footnotes:
Okay, my absolute surrender.