(This post appears as part of the document [GitHub - ballantony/emacs-writing: My Emacs Writing Setup](https://github.com/ballantony/emacs-writing): a guide to how I write novels and short stories using Emacs Org Mode) It can be a nuisance finding where things are even when writing a short story. When writing a novel, it’s easy to get lost amongst the story, the notes, the character sketches… Fortunately, Emacs and Org-Mode have a number of features to help you find your way around. The most basic and most useful method, of course, is Emacs search. [[Searching|I’ve written more about this here.]] Similar to search are **M-x** occur, and **C-c / r** org-occur These highlight all occurrences of the search string. This can be handy, for example, when searching to see which chapters a character appears in. Quite often I find myself jumping up and down a file, adding text here and there. You can use the standard mark-ring commands: **C-\<SPC\> C-\<SPC\>** Set the mark to the mark ring **C-u C-\<SPC\>** Move point to where the mark was … but org-mode has two commands that respectively push your current position to the mark-ring and jump to the last position on the mark ring. For convenience, I’ve bound them to the f7 key as follows. ```lisp (global-set-key (kbd "<f7>") 'org-mark-ring-push) (global-set-key (kbd "C-<f7>") 'org-mark-ring-goto) ``` Now, I simply hit **f7** to remember my position before heading off to edit elsewhere in the file, then hit **C-f7** to return to where I started. # Bookmarks I’m assuming you already know how to use bookmarks, but if you don’t, [here’s a link to the Emacs Wiki for a crash course](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BookMarks). As I write on multiple machines, I keep my bookmarks file on Dropbox so that I have a consistent set of bookmarks wherever I happen to be working. I’ve added the following command to my .emacs file to let Emacs know where my bookmarks are. ```lisp (setq bookmark-default-file "~/Dropbox/common/emacs/bookmarks.bmk" bookmark-save-flag 1) ``` I’ve got into the habit of having a bookmark named **here**. I try to set this mark when I finish working. When I start work, I simply jump to **here**.