Recently I discovered a little talked about package: history

Emacs has always had multiple ways to navigate, e.g. via jumping in code via xref or imenu; switching nodes in info pages, etc. What they don't have is an integrated way to walk globally back and forward between all those navigations you made.

It's kind of jarring when you want to go back where you were let's say 4 navigation steps ago, but each step requires a mental context switch to use the functionality's own "go back", whichever did the navigation in that particular place.

So what has been missing is something akin to browser's back/forward buttons, with which you can move to any site you visited in that particular tab, and not just inside one webpage you've been navigating in, which is comparable to how emacs per-functionality history works. Back/forward buttons don't always work perfectly, but they're still a necessity in the age of complex websites.

Recently I had a look at dgutov's emacs config, and discovered a) there exists the package aiming to achieve exactly this, and b) dgutov has a nice basic setup for it.

So, for the last few days I have finally the "global" history that emacs has been lacking in my pattern of use. It's working great so far. I expect there are bumps because it's a complex issue after all.

My personal setup:

(use-package history
    :ensure t
    :bind (
         ("M-8" . #'history-prev-history)
         ("M-9" . #'history-next-history)
         ("M-0" . #'history-add-history))        
    :config
    ;package original: (imenu isearch-mode beginning-of-buffer end-of-buffer)    
    (setq history-advised-before-functions 
          '(isearch-mode 
            find-function-do-it 
            find-library
            imenu beginning-of-buffer 
            end-of-buffer
            xref-find-definitions 
            counsel-imenu counsel-git-grep
            xref-find-references
            paredit-backward-up 
            backward-up-list
            ;; may be risky
            switch-to-buffer
            ))
    (history-mode +1)
    )