Over at the Emacs subredit, RecursiveTraverser says that of all the Avy navigation commands he likes avy-goto-char-timer the best and asks if anyone else agrees. Those who answered agreed with him but there’s no reason to prefer it to the exclusion of the others.
As I’ve written before, I often use avy-goto-char-timer but I more often prefer avy-goto-word-1, which works well for most cases. The important thing is to use these functions—or even isearch as recommended by Steve Yegge—rather than moving the cursor around by hand with Ctrl+n, Ctrl+p, Ctrl+f, Ctrl+b, or, even worse, the arrow keys.
The avy-goto-word-1 command is by far my most frequent way of navigating around a buffer. I’ll occasionally use avy-goto-char but that tends to be too noisy so I just use one of the other commands to get to the beginning of the word and then move to the proper character. This is one the times that avy-goto-char-timer is useful. You can specify a few characters and get right to where you want to be. I also use it when I have many words with the same prefix and want to go to one particular word. An example is my journal that may be showing a single, say, “Wednesday” but many instances of “Wed.” I can call avy-goto-char-timer and type “wedn” to go right to the word I want more easily than any other way.
The main takeaway from this post, though, is that you should definitely by using the Avy navigation functions. If you aren’t, you’re working too hard.