Better window navigation in Emacs?

When I split window in emacs several times (under terminal) the whole screen is divided into several parts with hierarchical arrangement. In vim it is easy to开发者_开发技巧 switch between windows intuitively with Control-w + (h,j,k,l), but in Emacs I can only use Control-x + o to switch to "the other window", which probably would require several iterations to finally get to the window I intend. I wonder if there is a better way similar to that in Vim to easily navigate between windows?

Have you tried WindMove? It comes bundled with Emacs 21+. You move around with Shift-up, Shift-down, Shift-left, and Shift-right, though you can change the modifier. From the docs:

;; Installation:
;;
;; Put the following line in your `.emacs' file:
;;
;;     (windmove-default-keybindings)         ; shifted arrow keys
;;
;; or
;;
;;     (windmove-default-keybindings 'hyper)  ; etc.
;;
;; to use another modifier key.
;;
;;
;; If you wish to enable wrap-around, also add a line like:
;;
;;    (setq windmove-wrap-around t)

I find the default binding for other-window to be really tedious, too. I've defined the following in my .emacs:

(global-set-key [(control ?,)] (lambda () (interactive) (other-window -1)))
(global-set-key [(control ?.)] (lambda () (interactive) (other-window 1)))

Just find some easy-to-reach keybindings (I use a Dvorak layout, so C-, and C-. may not be as easy for you to reach), preferably right next to each other, to bind to those lambdas.

Also, I found the Emacs wiki a few months ago. Nifty Tricks has a nice list of ways to make Emacs easier to use!

In Icicles, by default C-x o is bound to the multi-command icicle-other-window-or-frame, which works this way:

• With no prefix arg or a non-zero numeric prefix arg: If the selected frame has multiple windows, then this is other-window. Otherwise, it is other-frame.

• With a zero prefix arg (e.g. C-0): If the selected frame has multiple windows, then this is icicle-select-window with windows in the frame as candidates. Otherwise (single-window frame), this is icicle-select-frame.

• With plain C-u: If the selected frame has multiple windows, then this is icicle-select-window with windows from all visible frames as candidates. Otherwise, this is icicle-select-frame.

Well then, what are icicle-select-window and icicle-select-frame?

They are multi-commands that let you choose a window or frame to select by name. (You can bind them separately, if you want -- they each change their behavior based on their own prefix args.)

Window and frame names are taken from their displayed buffers, with [N] (N=1,2,...) appended if needed for a unique name if the same buffer is displayed in more than one window/frame.

Being multi-commands, you can choose by completing and/or cycling. Completion can be prefix, substring, regexp, or fuzzy.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Multi-Commands

See switch-window. It will number windows to let you switch directly to the one you want.

That was also my first experience with emacs. But, using windmove, I can suite it, they way I want it. I use this as the modifier for windmove :

(windmove-default-keybindings 'meta)

I use ALT for the navigation of windmove