Marcin Borkowski has a nice post on Emacs’ follow mode. I’ve known about follow mode for a long time but never saw the point of it. That’s because I always thought of it as being used only on prose buffers. But as Borkowski points out, it’s really useful for code buffers where you want to see all or most of a large (or, perhaps more than one) function. By using follow mode you get two side-by-side windows that act as a single large window as far as scrolling is concerned.
When you scroll one window, the other scrolls too just as if they were a single window. This effectively doubles the height of your screen. But it gets better.
If you have enough horizontal real estate, you can split a window into not just two but three (or more) windows and link them together with follow mode so that they act as a single window tripling (or more) the height of you screen.
As I said at the top, I’ve never run across a case where doing this for a prose buffer was worth the effort of invoking follow mode but I agree with Borkowski that it can be useful for code buffers where surrounding context can be critical. Now that my eyes have been opened, perhaps I’ll make follow mode a part of my everyday toolkit.
If you aren’t already a follow mode user, take a look at Borkowski’s post. It’s reasonably short and you’ll learn some things that may be useful for your own workflow.