Over at the GDQuest YouTube Channel, Nathan Lovato has a very nice video on navigating with Spacemacs. Most of the video discusses the Spacemacs interface to the Avy package for jumping around in your code. I’m not a Spacemacs user but I do heavily use Avy for navigation. It is by far the best system I’ve come across for this sort of thing. Once you get used to it, you’ll hardly ever navigate by moving the cursor up and down a line at a time or backwards and forwards a character at a time. It’s just so much simpler and faster to get there with Avy.

My favorite commands are avy-goto-word-1 and avy-goto-char-timer. The first marks every word that begins with the character you specify and lets you choose which one to jump to. The second lets you enter as many characters as you like. When you stop, you can jump to any of the marked sequences. Both are very useful and I call them all the time. The video covers other commands, such as jumping directly to a line, as well. There’s also a short section on using imenu. Lovato shows you how to do all this in Spacemacs so if you’re a member of that Emacs sect you should definitely take a look. The video is 12 minutes long so it should be easy to fit into your schedule.