I’m a fan of clever little things that change their behaviour depending on what you’re doing while letting you mentally think of it as just one function.

ace-isearch looks like it’ll be useful for collapsing three different functions into one mental thing in my head:

• jumping to a specific character that I can see (ace-jump-mode)
• searching through a buffer for a few characters (isearch)
• doing helm-swoop to quickly preview and navigate through matching lines in a buffer

If you install the ace-isearch package and turn on global-ace-isearch-mode, then searching for a single character triggers ace-jump-mode, searching for less than 5 characters triggers isearch, and anything longer triggers helm-swoop-from-isearch. You can customize those thresholds, of course.

Neat!