Links: Vim
Macros are a little bit like an overpowered dot command, They allow us to record any number of commands and repeat them at will later.
To record a macro you need to press q followed by any letter, that letter will be where the macro will be recorded. Then you execute the serie of commands that you want to record and press q again.
To execute said macro you press @ followed by the letter that you used before.
You can also repeat the last executed macro with @@ as .@ would only repeat the last command inside the macro.
Macros and registers
To learn more about how macros work check out Alphabetic registers and macros
Example
A very common example where I like to use macros is when editing a list of items, let’s make a simple one to add ”;” at the end of each line.
We are gonna use the register “a” but you could save this anywhere, so to start qa now to append ”;” to the end of the line we could do $a;<ESC> but we can shorten $a as just A (for adding something at the beginning you could also use I instead of 0i).
Now we want to be on the next line to make it easier to execute the macro again, so j and lastly q to finish the macro.
Adding all this together it would be qaA;<ESC>jq And to execute this you could do @a, maybe you have 10 lines to add a semicolon, so you could got to the first one and do 10@a.
If you wanted to repeat this with every line in a file the fastest way to do that is with recursion, in this case with qaA;<ESC>j@aq the macro would call itself until there are no more lines.
Note that for recursion to work you need to save the macro in a clean register, to clean the register “a” you can execute qaq.