The other day it popped into my mind to wonder what the most useful Emacs editing functions are. Various people—like Xah Lee—have taken actual measurements of the most used functions. The most often used function is, of course, self-insert-command, which runs every time you type a displayable character into the buffer. You can read Lee’s excellent analysis at the link.
My question is slightly different and I’m not being nearly as scientific. Rather, this is a subjective opinion on what I think the most useful functions are. Emacs, of course, has many whizzbang functions that do amazing things and that’s before we start considering things like Magit and Org. Still, I think it’s the humble navigation commands that are most useful.
Whatever you’re using Emacs for, it’s going to involve entering and editing text. Unless you’re the mythical keyboard maestro who never makes a typo and, additionally, never revises your text, you’re going to need to move around the buffer to fix typos and revise your content.
Being able to move around quickly and easily is a vital feature of any editor. Emacs makes it easy and fast to move around without using the arrow keys or mouse. In addition to the standard movement functions, I use avy and jump-char to quickly place the cursor where I need it without depending on the standard cursor movement functions such as forward-char and its brethren. As a class, these are the functions I use the most. If your experience is different, leave a comment.