There’s been a spate of posts lately about navigating among windows in Emacs and The Emacs Cat decided to jump in with a description of their own procedures. I like those procedures because they are essentially the same as mine.
Like The Emacs Cat, I use abo-abo’s ace-window to switch between windows and I don’t understand why anyone would use anything else. The idea is that when it’s invoked, ace-window will label each window with a number and you can then switch to any of the windows by typing requisite number. It’s easy and fast and after several years I haven’t found anything better.
Unlike The Cat, I just bind ace-window to Ctrl+x o. Most of the time it acts exactly like other-window because I typically have two windows open and in that case, ace-winodw simply gives focus to the other window. On those occasions when I have more than two windows open, moving to the correct window is only one additional keystroke. At one time, I also bound F8 to ace-window so I could switch windows even faster but I found I never used it.
I also use
:config (custom-set-faces '(aw-leading-char-face ((t (:inherit ace-jump-face-foreground :height 3.0)))))
in my use-package definition for ace-window so that the numbers on the windows are bigger.
Take it from The Emacs Cat and me. You really should be using ace-window to handle window navigation. It’s the best there is.