One thing I regularly do is to try and look for other occurrences of
the symbol at point in my buffer. This can serve as a poor man’s way
of finding the definition or callers of a function, or uses of a
variable. It’s kind of annoying to do that in Emacs by default, sadly.
The following code from my .emacs will enable the key shortcut C-d
in isearch to yank the symbol at point into the search string. So
C-s C-d will then start a search for that symbol, and already
highlight it. Keep hitting C-s to move to further occurrences.
(define-key isearch-mode-map (kbd "C-d")
'fc/isearch-yank-symbol)
(defun fc/isearch-yank-symbol ()
"Yank the symbol at point into the isearch minibuffer.
C-w does something similar in isearch, but it only looks for
the rest of the word. I want to look for the whole string. And
symbol, not word, as I need this for programming the most."
(interactive)
(isearch-yank-string
(save-excursion
(when (and (not isearch-forward)
isearch-other-end)
(goto-char isearch-other-end))
(thing-at-point 'symbol))))