2009-11-05

bookmarks

Emacs has a very useful system for bookmarks – shortcuts to often-used files. It's also one of those features I only really started using after years of emacs – there seem to be many of such obvious features…

Bookmarks are especially handy if you have long file names, or for examples the special file names for editing root-owned files discussed here before.

To start using bookmarks effectively, there are only a few important key bindings to memorize: C-x r m ('make') will create a new bookmark, defaulting to the current file. Then, you can jump to an existing bookmark with C-x r b ('bookmark') Finally, you can see the list of your bookmarks with C-x r l ('list').

There are a few customizations you can put in your .emacs:

(setq 
  bookmark-default-file "~/.emacs.d/bookmarks" ;; keep my ~/ clean
  bookmark-save-flag 1)                        ;; autosave each change)

4 comments:

Peng said...

Do you encounter any error with remember/org mode when this bookmark feature is used?

I got "Not bookmark format" error when I C-c C-c to save a quick note

djcb said...

@peng: note, bookmarks and org-mode are two different things, and have their own format. You cannot use org-mode links as bookmarks (or vice-versa).

Steven Haryanto said...

There are two pairs of shortcuts that I just discovered today: F1 and F2, and F11 and F12.

I used to do C-x r m 1, C-x r b 1, C-x r m 2, C-x r b 2.

For years.

I feel so relieved and yet so stupid.

Paul Hobbs said...

Steven,

F11 and F12 are undefined for me. I'm not sure what F2 is doing, and F1 is help.

What are you referring to?