Continous Bookmarking

When editing documents or code, my not so agile fingers, often trigger a movement or search command that accidentally throws me to a random location in the text I am editing. How can I return back? Amazingly, I noticed I am using exactly the same trick for returning back on both the vim editor I use for most of my editing tasks, and Microsoft Word I use for collaborating with many colleagues.

Once I land in a place I shouldn't be, I just enter an undo command followed by a redo (^Z/^Y in MS-Word, u/^r in vim). Movement commands can not be "undone", because they do not affect the document's state, so the side-effect of these commands is to move the cursor to the point I was last editing. In this way both tools (and many others, I assume) provide what could be described as continous bookmarking: a bookmark of the last place one edited.

Try it!

Comments   Toot! Tweet Share