Regular readers know that I’ve been a huge fan of ace-jump-mode ever since I saw it demonstrated by Magnor Sveen in one of his celebrated Emacs Rocks! episodes. More recently, I’ve been using it all the time as a replacement for isearch to navigate within a buffer.
Since I started using ace-jump-mode instead of the Yegge approved isearch, my efficiency at jumping around a buffer has been increased significantly. Still, it doesn’t directly address a problem that I often have. When scrolling through a buffer with【Ctrl+v】 or【Meta+v】, I often find myself at the wrong edge of the display—at the top when I want the bottom, or vice versa. I generally solve that problem by picking a word on the desired line and using ace-jump-mode to jump directly to that word. It turns out, though, that ace-jump-mode has me covered for that case too. If I type【Ctrl+u Ctrl+u Hyper+a】 instead of【Hyper+a】, where【Hyper+a】is the sequence I use to invoke ace-jump-mode, each line is marked and I can jump to the desired line by typing the corresponding letter.
One could argue, I suppose, that that’s not any easier than picking a word on the desired line and jumping to that word but it feels more direct and somehow doesn’t take as many of my ever-diminishing brain cycles to invoke. If you aren’t already an ace-jump-mode user, you owe it to yourself to try it out. You’ll be amazed at how much more efficient your navigation becomes.