Jumping around in Emacs

I’m often in a situation where I start writing a function and notice that I’d like to use a helper function that doesn’t exist yet. When this function should be created in a different file, no problem: Open a new buffer, visit and edit the file there and kill the buffer again. Emacs will restore me to the previous point in the other buffer.

But what about when I want that function to exist in the same file and I want to jump right back where I left off once I have that function? Emacs supports this for instance through the so-called mark. You’ve probably already used the mark before when you selected text in order to change or remove it…

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The Mark

Whenever you create such a region you basically operate between two positions: the pointer (where your cursor ends up being when you’re done) and the mark (usually where the cursor was at the start of the selection). During the selection process the mark is “active” and you see the region being highlighted. Whenever you create a mark it is added to a ring of positions called the “mark ring”. Setting the mark is done with the C-<SPC> shortcut (or the set-mark-command command) which starts the selection process. But since we don’t want to create a selection here, we can deactivate the mark right away again hitting C-<SPC> once more.

So now we have our mark on the mark-ring and it is not active, so changing your position inside the buffer won’t create a region (and potentially highlight it). After moving around for a while (for instance to create that other function we wanted to work with at the previous position) we want to get back were we left off. The previous position is just one C-u C-<SPC> away!

;; Create a mark and deactive it right away
C-<SPC> C-<SPC>

;; Jump back to the head of the mark-ring and pop it afterwards
C-u C-<SPC>

Always keep in mind that the mark is also used for creating regions/selections. So whenever you select text, the current head of the mark-ring is changed and therefore jumping back might return you to a position you didn’t necessarily expect. Just hit the jump-back key-combo repeatadly ;-)

Register storage

Because of that I’ve also started to look at the point-to-register and jump-to-register functions which allow you to store positions outside of the mark-ring inside a register with a single character name.

;; Set a new mark
C-x r <SPC>

;; Jump to a register
C-x r j

Especially the key-map for the setter felt rather tedious to me so I’ve remapped it to something that is closer to the one for setting the mark:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-<SPC>") 'point-to-register)

You have to enter the name of the register the position should be stored in so the key-chain becomes a little longer than for simply using the mark. Because of that I’ve also experimented with having another shortcut that used these methods on a specific register but quickly abandonned that approach because it ended up to confusing due to the position not being restricted to a single buffer.

Bookmarks

Another option I stumbled across was using bookmarks. They kind of feel like a more permanent version of point-to-register in that all your bookmarks are by default stored into ~/.emacs.d/bookmarks. You can give those bookmarks arbitrary names when you create them. By default the name of the current file is used which should be enough for my initial use-case but it might become confusing if you have multiple files with the same name in your project.

;; Set a bookmark
C-x r m

;; List bookmarks
C-x r l

;; Jump back to a bookmark
C-x r b

I haven’t yet had a look at Bookmark+ but it’s better default-name handling might be a good reason to do that in the future :)

Now what?

With these three options Emacs solves my initial use-case quite nicely out of the box. I’m not yet sure which approach I’ll eventually prefer but I’d guess it would either be the register-storage or bookmarks. Especially when working with a mouse messing up the mark-ring seems far too easy to me.

I’m not yet sure if bookmarks are the right thing either but I definitely have other use-cases for them!