We’ve looked before at how emacs leaves a trail of breadcrumbs (the mark ring) through which you can navigate to hop around to places you’ve been in the buffer.

A nice alternative is to move round through points at which you made edits in a buffer. You can do this by installing the package goto-chg. Set it up by adding the following to your emacs config file:

(require 'goto-chg)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b ,") 'goto-last-change)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b .") 'goto-last-change-reverse)

Now you can use C-c b , and C-c b . to go back and forth through the edit points in your buffer. It takes you through your undo history without actually undoing anything.

For bonus points you can use C-u 0 C-c b , to give a description of the change you made at a particular stop on your tour.