In order to get better at emacs I’m focusing on a few keyboard shortcuts at a time in order to really grok it and start using them effectively.
I’m starting out with the other-window family of commands. There are
quite a few of them, but these are some of the more useful. They are
pretty easy to memorize in that they are variations of other common
commands and share the same keyboard shortcut except for that infix
4.
dired-other-window (C-x 4 d)
Runs dired in the other window. I don’t use dired that much, but I can see how this comes in handy.
find-file-other-window (C-x 4 f)
Open a new file in the other window. This is really useful, as I often open a new file, split the window in two, go back to the original window and switch back to the original file. This command does all that at once.
ido-switch-buffer-other-window (C-x 4 b)
Switch to another buffer in the other window. Again, this is something that I do a lot, and I’m happy there’s a shortcut for it.
If you have ido installed (and you should), the latter two will bind
to ido-find-file-other-window and ido-switch-buffer-other-window
respectively. They do more or less the same thing, only better.