Upgrading ace-jump for avy

It was a few years ago that I learned about ace-jump-mode in one of Magnar’s Emacs Rocks episodes. Over this time, slowly but surely, this one simple command has completely taken over my workflow. It was only last week that I realised how ingrained it is on my muscle memory. As I shared this thought on twitter, @_abo_abo’s avy was mentioned in the conversation and I decided to give it a try.

Until now, I was under the impression that it was just ace-jump for windows, but it’s a little more than that. It is actually a full replacement for ace-jump, with small improvements here and there (plus quite a bit of parallel functionality which I haven’t explored yet).

A couple of small but important differences.

• By default, the buffer text doesn’t get shadowed while you’re doing a jump. I didn’t like this at first, but now I much prefer it. Shadowing the text is prettier, but I would commonly get lost if I didn’t focus intently on that letter before the shadowing was applied.
• When more than one key is needed for a jump, it’ll show you the full path, instead of one key at a time.

And this is all the configuration I needed.

(setq avy-keys
      '(?c ?a ?s ?d ?e ?f ?h ?w ?y ?j ?k ?l ?n ?m ?v ?r ?u ?p))
(global-set-key (kbd "M-s") #'avy-goto-word-1)