Usually I use a method that I found on some Emacs-related website. It said to use text search for navigating around the file. That's why I use / pretty often. I use f, t, and related movements as arguments to actions.

Maybe this page: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

I love using search interactive to navigate text. But however, getting the point to the right spot after that still feels cumbersome, in particular, moving to the beginning of the matched word doesn't seem easy.

No, if I remember correctly it was somewhere on http://emacswiki.org which is a great resource by the way.

I've had ; mapped to : forever.

Is there a use for `;` I'm missing out on? `;` just seems to be for stuff like "`fp` -- Oh wait, I didn't see all the p's between my cursor and the p I wanted. ; ; ; ;."

Now I use easymotion.vim which obviates that scenario.

I created vim-seek exactly for this reason, it's like f but takes always two characters, way faster than easymotion within the line (though I still use easymotion for longer distances) http://github.com/goldfeld/vim-seek

Cool! Until I found easymotion.vim, I was sort of doing a poor man's vim-seek with `/` and two chars.

For me it's often fp <something> ;. ;. ;. ;.

For example if I have a longer line I would like I could do something like f,a<cr><esc>k,.k,.k,.k,.k,.k,.

g; will move the cursor to the line of your last edit (and further through your edit history). I find it useful as a move command but also use it to remind myself of what and where my last edit was.

I have the spacebar as my <leader>: doesn't clobber a useful mapping and much easier to hit than '\'.

On a related note, I think that f and t become ever more awesome if you use fanfingtastic: https://github.com/dahu/vim-fanfingtastic

I use \ for <leader>, doesn't seem to clash with anything I do on a regular basis (but I'm not a power user by any means)

It doesn't clash with anything at all, as it is the default <leader>.

Ah, I had no idea. I saw it explicitly defined in someone's vimrc and thought, hey that's a good key to use.

I use ; quite a lot after "f"orward, but I rarely use ,. Just doesn't come up much in every-day work.

What is the default behavior for ","?

It's ";" in reverse, i.e repeat the latest f,F,t or T backwards.