Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 69

Append Commands to a Macro

Sometimes we miss a vital step when we record a macro. There’s no need to re-record the whole thing from scratch. Instead, we can tack extra commands onto the end of an existing macro.

Suppose that we record this macro (borrowed from Tip 68):

Keystrokes	Buffer contents
qa	1. one 2. two
0f.r)w~	1) One 2. two
q	1) One 2. two

Immediately after pressing q to stop recording, we realize that we should have finished by pressing j to advance to the next line.

Before we fix it, let’s inspect the contents of register a:

:reg a
"a        0f.r)w~

If we type qa, then Vim will record our keystrokes, saving them into register a by overwriting the existing contents of that register. If we type qA, then Vim will ...