Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Beyond Macros

Macros are an important tool for streamlining repetitive editing. They let you write your own commands for performing complex tasks without needing to know anything more than you already know: the basic Emacs commands for moving around and manipulating text. Even if you're an Emacs novice, you should be able to use macros with little difficulty.

However, Emacs is almost infinitely flexible, and macros cannot do everything. In many situations, there's no substitute for writing a Lisp function that does exactly what you want. If you know Lisp or would like to learn some, you can write your own Lisp functions to do more complex tasks than keyboard macros can handle. Chapter 11 covers the basics of writing Lisp functions.

Table 6-6 summarizes macro commands.

Table 6-6. Macro commands

Keystrokes	Command name	Action
C-x (	kmacro-start-macro	Start macro definition.
F3	kmacro-start-macro-or-insert-counter	Start macro definition. If pressed while defining a macro, insert a counter.
C-x )	kmacro-end-macro	End macro definition.
F4	kmacro-end-or-call-macro	End macro definition (if definition is in progress) or invoke last keyboard macro.
C-x e	kmacro-end-and-call-macro	Execute last keyboard macro defined. Can type e to repeat macro.
C-x C-k n	name-last-kbd-macro	Name the last macro you created (before saving it).
(none)	insert-kbd-macro	Insert the macro you named into a file.
(none)	macroname	Execute a named keyboard macro. ...