I just discovered a useful trick over at Ruslan’s Tech Blog. It’s about finding the file at point. Ruslan does this a lot. I, on the other hand, hardly every do it but I have gotten used to typing Ctrl+c Ctrl+o to follow a link in an Org buffer. Despite using the goto-addr package, this doesn’t work reliably everywhere.
Ruslan was also bothered by the difficulty of opening a file at point—although his normal usage didn’t involve Org. Like many of us, he thought he’d just write a quick command to do what he wanted but before embarking on that, he read the documentation for find-file and discovered that the functionality he wanted was already there.
If the point is on a file path, you can invoke Meta+x find-file-at-point but that’s a lot of typing. It’s a bit less typing if you use its ffap alias but perhaps still too much. Instead, you can just type Ctrl+x Ctrl+f as usual and then Meta+n to follow the link at point. It’s a nice solution because you do what you always do when you want to open a file and then type Meta+n instead of a file path to open the file at point. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything to enable this. It’s the default Emacs behavior.