Overview

Visual navigation through mark rings in Emacs.

Two-way movement within the ring is supported.

• Quickstart
• Explanation
• Default key bindings
• Notes
• Compatibility and Requirements

Quickstart

(require 'back-button)

(back-button-mode 1)

;; press the plus sign in the toolbar to create a mark

;; press the arrows in the toolbar to navigate marks

;; or use C-x C-Space as usual, then try C-x C-<right>
;; to reverse the operation

Explanation

Back-button provides an alternative method for navigation by analogy with the "back" button in a web browser.

Every Emacs command which pushes the mark leaves behind an invisible record of the location of the point at that moment. Back-button moves the point back and forth over all the positions where some command pushed the mark.

This is essentially a replacement for pop-global-mark, and the default keybindings (when the minor mode is activated) override that command. The differences with pop-global-mark are:

• Visual index showing how far you have traveled in the mark ring.

• Easy way to move both forward and backward in the ring.

• Pushes a mark on the first of a series of invocations, so you can always return to where you issued the command.

• Skips duplicate positions, so that the interactive command always moves the point if possible.

Commands and keybindings are also included to give identical semantics for navigating the local (per-buffer) mark-ring. This consistency in navigation comes at the cost of pushing the mark twice, so experienced Emacs users may prefer to unbind these commands and/or set back-button-never-push-mark in customize.

When the visible-mark package is installed, marks will be made visible in the current buffer during navigation.

Default key bindings

When the smartrep package is installed, the C-x prefix need not be used for consecutive back-button commands.

Notes

This library depends upon other commands pushing the mark to provide useful waypoints for navigation. This is a common convention, but not universal.

The function back-button-push-mark-local-and-global may be useful to call from Lisp. It is a replacement for push-mark which unconditionally pushes onto the global mark ring, functionality which is not possible using vanilla push-mark.

Theoretically, back-button-push-mark-local-and-global could cause issues with Lisp code which depends on the convention that global-mark-ring not contain consecutive marks in the same buffer. However, no such issues have been observed.

Compatibility and Requirements

GNU Emacs version 24.4-devel     : yes, at the time of writing
GNU Emacs version 24.3           : yes
GNU Emacs version 23.3           : yes
GNU Emacs version 22.2           : yes, with some limitations
GNU Emacs version 21.x and lower : unknown

For GNU Emacs versions lower than 24.3, the cl-lib package is required.

Uses if present: nav-flash.el, smartrep.el, unicode-fonts.el, visible-mark.el