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An introduction to Vim macros

Vim is my favourite text editor, because it is minimalist while also being insanely configurable. While I may describe my ideal Vim setup sometime in the future, I do want to share some tips and tricks that make Vim so damn efficient for certain tasks. Today, I shall focus on macros.

Here’s the key idea to keep in mind when discussing about Vim. Vim is not just an editor, it is a text manipulation program. Inserting text is just one of the many tasks that Vim can accomplish. A macro is a small Vim program that the user can record in order to make text editing more efficient.

Consider a simple use case. Let’s say that I have a CSV file that looks like this

New York,NY,USA
Seattle,WA,USA
Mumbai,MH,India

Let’s say that I want to add another column at the beginning of each line that is sequentially numbered, like so

1,New York,NY,USA
2,Seattle,WA,USA
3,Mumbai,MH,India

I could go down each line and manually add each column, but there’s a better way. The solution is to program a Vim macro that does the following tasks in order.

  1. Assuming that the first column of a certain line is the required number for this line (row), we copy the first column to the next line.

  2. Increment the line number by one so that it is one more than the previous line (row).

So, I edit the first line, in order to manually add the new column to the first line.

1,New York,NY,USA
Seattle,WA,USA
Mumbai,MH,India

Next, I ensure that I’m not executing any Vim command. I can verify this by pressing ESC a couple of times. Then I press q followed by a letter to identify this macro, e.g.: a. The macro then consists of the following keystrokes

  1. 0: Move to the beginning of the line.
  2. v: Visual mode.
  3. /,: Find the first , to match.
  4. y: Yank (copy) the highlighted text.
  5. j0: Go to the beginning of the next line.
  6. P: Paste the copied text. At this point, the cursor should be on the ,.
  7. h: Move the cursor one position to the left so that it is on the last digit of the number.
  8. Ctrla: Increment the number.
  9. q: Stop recording the macro.

Now, pressing @a would perform the nine steps outlined with just two key-presses. Let’s say the file had 50 more lines to be edited. In this case, I could use another powerful trick that Vim offers – the ability to repeat a command multiple times. So, ensure that I’m out of executing any command, I could type in a number followed by a command that would execute the specified command a certain number of times. So, pressing 50@a would execute the macro a fifty times, which is an insanely powerful technique for modifying multiple lines with a single command.

That’s all for Vim macros for today. I hope you found this post useful. Macros were one of the things I learnt relatively late as a Vim user, but now that I do know about this trick, I use it all the time, and it has saved me countless hours and a lot of headache when modifying code or text. Until the next time, when I take some time to write some more about cool Vim tricks and tips.

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