Mike Zamansky is back with another video in his Using Emacs Series. This time he discusses Emacs bookmarks and the Burly package. You can set a bookmark for any file that you need often and use the bookmark-jump function to bring that file up quickly and easily. Burly does the same sort of thing but for window/buffer configurations. Take a look at Zamansky’s video to see it in action.
Bookmarks are one of those things that seem like a no-brainer yet many—or perhaps most—of us don’t make as much use of them as we should. That changed for me several years ago when I stole a bunch of ideas from abo-abo. First off was to install bookmarks+, which among other things lets me bookmark websites so I can go to them right from Emacs. This, along with abo-abo’s headlong package allow me to map the bookmarks to one or two letter sequences. Wrapping all this into a window configuration hydra allows me to enter Hyper+w m t to bring up my tax file or Hyper+w m b to open my blog in Safari. I wrote about all of that here.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that any files you have in ~/.agenda-files will be loaded automatically when Emacs starts so I usually visit those by typing in the first letter or two of the file name and letting council-find-file load it for me. It’s just as quick and easy as using a bookmark and I don’t have to add it to my bookmarks file.
Emacs has a lot of ways of quickly loading files and happily none of them require the use of a mouse. Take a look at Zamansky’s video for one of them. The video is 17 minutes, 32 seconds so plan accordingly.