Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition

Beyond Macros

Macros are an extremely 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 13 covers the basics of writing LISP functions.

Table 10-1 summarizes the macro commands we discussed in this chapter.

Table 11-1. Macro Commands

Keystrokes	Command Name	Action
C-x (	start-kbd-macro	Start macro definition.
C-x )	end-kbd-macro	End macro definition.
C-x e	call-last-kbd-macro	Execute last macro defined.
ESC n C-x e	digit-argument and call-last-kbd-macro	Execute the last macro defined n times.
C-u C-x (	universal-argument; start-kbd-macro	Execute the last macro defined and then it allows you to add keystrokes to it.
(none)	name-last-kbd-macro	Name the last macro you created (a preface to saving it).
(none)	insert-last-keyboard-macro	Insert the macro you named into a file.
(none)	load-file	Load a file containing command ...