How to jump to next bullet point in org mode

Say that you are an avid Emacs user and are fun of org-mode. What if you find yourself in the middle of a very long bullet list like:

• a
• b
• c
• d
• e
• ... you are here ...
• m
• n
• o
• p

Assume that the "..." stand for a lot of text. If you want to jump to the next bullet in the list, there is no default keybinding to simplify the matter.

After a little of "C-h f", I found out that org-mode has a function called org-next-item! That lets you jump to the next available bullet point, and throws an error if you are not in a bullet list.

But we want a reasonable keybinding for it. Org-mode comes with "C-c C-n" which lets you jump to the next visible heading.

How about we override? The trick is to handle the error for when we are not in a list: if in a list go to next bullet point else to next visible heading.

This is the code for your enjoyment:

(defun ag/next-entry-or-next-visible-header ()
  (interactive)
  (condition-case err
      (org-next-item)
    (error (org-next-visible-heading 1))))
(define-key org-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-n") #'ag/next-entry-or-next-visible-header)

(defun ag/previous-entry-or-previous-visible-header ()
  (interactive)
  (condition-case err
      (org-previous-item)
    (error (org-previous-visible-heading 1))))
(define-key org-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-p") #'ag/previous-entry-or-previous-visible-header)

An improvement could be to allow an (universal) argument to indicate we do not want to use org-next-item, but I did not need that yet :)