As longtime Irreal readers know, I am an Avy fanatic and use it as my principal means of buffer navigation. For a long time, I mostly used avy-goto-word-1 but it can only be used to search for the beginning of words. Four years ago, Karthink Chikmagalur published a post that recommended using avy-goto-char-timer exclusively. For some reason, I ignored his post at the time but a couple of years ago I was reacquainted with his recommendation and resolved to use avy-goto-char-timer more.
One day I suddenly realized that I was, in fact, using it exclusively and couldn’t even remember my binding for avy-goto-word-1. It solves the problem of avy-goto-word-1 being able to find only the beginning of words.
As the name suggests, avi-goto-char-timer will accept input chars until there’s no input for the timeout value. Then it will present a tree of potential targets having those characters. The default timeout value is 0.5 seconds so if you stop typing for half a second, avy-goto-char-timer will present you with a tree of targets.
Lately—perhaps because I mostly work with my laptop on my lap or perhaps because of declining reaction times—I’ve found that half a second isn’t quite long enough. It often produces suboptimal outcomes, resulting in spurious characters being added to the text in the worst case.
As often happens, I put up with this infelicity for some time before I finally got fed up enough to do something about it. The “something” in this case was trivial. I simply increased the timeout value to 1.5 seconds. That may be a little long but it seems fine so far. I can, of course, always decrease it a bit if it turns out to hold things up.