Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 72

Edit the Contents of a Macro

In Tip 69, we saw that adding commands at the end of a macro is straightforward. But what if we want to remove the last command? Or change something at the beginning of the macro? In this tip, we’ll learn how to edit the content of a macro as if it were plain text.

The Problem: Nonstandard Formatting

Suppose that we’ve just followed the steps in ​Record One Unit of Work​, saving our keystrokes into register a. Now we’re faced with this file, which is formatted slightly differently:

macros/mixed-lines.txt

1. One
2. Two
3. three
4. four

Some of the lines already use a capital letter. In our macro, we used the ~ command, which toggles the case of the letter under the cursor (see ~ⓘ). Instead of using