Fast cursor movement

I’ve used Eclipse for many years. What always bothered me about it is that it forces you to use the mouse all the time, even for things like switching between buffers¹. Which is a very common operation: add an argument to the definition of a function, switch to the file where it is called, and change the function call. In fact my Emacs configuration sets up a very easy key for switching between the 2 most recently used buffers.

One of the many great things about Emacs (and Vim as well) is that you can do everything you need without ever using the mouse, and in fact without even requiring a GUI. This is a killer feature compared to most IDEs because menus and mice are slow. If your hands don’t have to leave the home row, you can change text almost as fast as you think.

You can get more productive if you know how to move the cursor quickly within a buffer. There are several clever extensions for that, but here we’ll review a few built-in keys. Note that I’m using the arrow keys because they are easy to remember².

Beginning and end

These four keys are a must:

Move by words

Any major mode may have its own definition of what a word is (it is defined in the mode’s syntax table).

Unfortunately these keys are not symmetrical: moving right then left does not necessarily bring you back where you started. For programming, I found it useful to define these extra keys for moving by semantic units rather than words:

(define-key global-map [(meta right)]
  #'(lambda (arg)
      (interactive "p")
      (forward-same-syntax arg)))

(define-key global-map [(meta left)]
  #'(lambda (arg)
      (interactive "p")
      (forward-same-syntax (- arg))))

You can pass a numeric argument to these commands to move by more than a single word. The Universal numeric argument prefix lets you pass a number to a command, and the prefix is C-u followed by the number followed by the command. For example C-u 3 C-right moves forward 3 words.

Move by paragraphs

I use these all the time:

Move by defuns

You can move to the beginning or end of a class or function almost the same way you move to the beginning or end of the line, except that the prefix is M-C-:

Repeat to go to the next or previous class/function.

Move by s-expression

This is very handy for Lisp. In Lisp, an s-expression (symbolic expression or sexp) is an atom or a list. For other programming languages, Emacs also considers strings and blocs between curly braces or square brackets. Moving by sexp is similar to moving by word, only the prefix is M-C-:

Give it a try, it is more useful than you think.

One more thing

You can use M-x view-lossage to assess your productivity with Emacs: this function displays the last 300 keys you have pressed. If it shows the same key repeated many times, you are probably doing it wrong.