I've used emacs for many years, and don't often go out of my way to tweak/customize it further, making do with what I've learned earlier. This may be old hat to some, but I just found it today and really really like it: bind a convenient-to-type key to isearch-forward-symbol-at-point and add this to your Emacs init: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_isearch_by_arrow_keys.html