Whizz between windows with windmove

First up, a reminder: in Emacs’ terminology the thing we usually call a window in other apps (the main display of an app with the menus etc at the top) is called a frame, and the individual panes within that (usually displaying different buffers side by side) are called windows.

Once you have been using Emacs for a while, you might find it more efficient to have a single large frame with several windows open inside displaying different buffers. It is then really easy to move between them using the built-in library windmove.

Activate windmove by adding the following to your emacs config file:

(use-package windmove
  ;; :defer 4
  :ensure t
  :config
  ;; use command key on Mac
  (windmove-default-keybindings 'super)
  ;; wrap around at edges
  (setq windmove-wrap-around t))

Now you can hold down the super key (Command on a Mac) and press arrow keys to move to windows in any direction. Note that the default key is shift plus arrow, but this conflicts rather painfully with org-mode, so I prefer super.