To realize the concept of instant editing, it is beneficial for us to get familiar with navigation operations in Org mode. In this post, I’ll summarize those that I use most during my note-taking and task management activities.

  • S-TAB: Global visibility cycling
  • Display headings to a certain level
    • C-<n> C-c TAB: place a cursor at a heading and press this hotkey to show its subheadings to level <n>.

    • C-<n> S-TAB: show all headings in the current buffer to level <n>.

      For my personal journal, I put the writing year, date and article title in the first, second and third level headings respectively. Then I often use this function to browse the list of journal titles by showing the headings to level 3, while the contents are still folded.

  • Quickly jump back and forth in Org mode
    • org-mark-ring-push (C-c %): push the current cursor location into the ring buffer.
    • org-mark-ring-goto (C-c *): go to the previous cursor location in the ring buffer.
  • org-goto (C-c C-j): quickly jump to a heading in the current file via interactive search.

  • C-c C-x b: Open a subtree in an indirect buffer.

    This is very useful for focusing to a specific subtree for reading and editing.