(This post appears as part of the document My Emacs Writing Setup: a guide to how I write novels and short stories using Emacs Org Mode)
It can be a nuisance finding where things are even when writing a short story. When writing a novel, it’s easy to get lost amongst the story, the notes, the character sketches…
Fortunately, Emacs and Org-Mode have a number of features to help you find your way around.
The most basic and most useful method, of course, is Emacs search. I’ve written more about this here.
Similar to search are
M-x occur, and C-c / r org-occur
These highlight all occurrences of the search string. This can be handy, for example, when searching to see which chapters a character appears in.
Quite often I find myself jumping up and down a file, adding text here and there. You can use the standard mark-ring commands:
C-<SPC> C-<SPC> Set the mark to the mark ring C-u C-<SPC> Move point to where the mark was
… but org-mode has two commands that respectively push your current position to the mark-ring and jump to the last position on the mark ring. For convenience, I’ve bound them to the f7 key as follows.
(global-set-key (kbd "<f7>") 'org-mark-ring-push) (global-set-key (kbd "C-<f7>") 'org-mark-ring-goto)
Now, I simply hit f7 to remember my position before heading off to edit elsewhere in the file, then hit C-f7 to return to where I started.
Bookmarks
As I write on multiple machines, I keep my bookmarks file on Dropbox so that I have a consistent set of bookmarks wherever I happen to be working. I’ve added the following command to my .emacs file to let Emacs know where my bookmarks are.
(setq bookmark-default-file "~/Dropbox/common/emacs/bookmarks.bmk" bookmark-save-flag 1)
I’ve got into the habit of having a bookmark named here. I try to set this mark when I finish working. When I start work, I simply jump to here.
Tony Ballantyne Tech 