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Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition
book

Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

by Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric S. Raymond, Bill Rosenblatt
December 2004
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
536 pages
19h 28m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6. Writing Macros

What is a macro? In Emacs, a macro is simply a group of recorded keystrokes you can play back over and over again. Macros are a great way to save yourself repetitive work. For example, let's say you want to delete the third column of a table. Normally, you would go to the first line; move over to the third column; delete it; then go to the second line; give the same set of commands; and so on, until you finish, your fingers wear out, or you get too bored. Emacs lets you record the keystrokes you used to work on the first line of the table, and then "play these back" repeatedly until the job is done.[1]

Any command or action you do within Emacs, from typing text to editing to switching buffers, can be done within a macro. The key to using macros well is, not too surprisingly, recognizing when you're doing repetitive work: sensing that you have pressed more or less the same sequence of keys several times in a row. Once you learn to recognize repetitious work, you have a good feel for when to use macros. The next talent that you'll need is, given that you've recognized a cycle of "almost identical" keystrokes, figuring out how to make that cycle precisely identical—that is, figuring out a set of keystrokes that, if repeated, will do exactly what you want. Neither of these skills is particularly difficult; with a little practice, you'll be using macros all the time.

If this sounds like lazy man's programming, it is: macros give you a simple way to do very complicated ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006489Supplemental ContentErrata Page