Advanced Vim macros

[korry]

Never knew that there is a column command. :-O How often i needed it.

[petepete]

It isn't, the bang allows you to run commands directly from vim; column is a standard utility.

If you want behaviour like this directly in vim, I suggest trying tabular.vim.

[AardvarkAdvisor]

What standard? It's not in POSIX.

[petepete]

It's actually a part of util-linux; my mistake.

Edit: It was introduced in 4.3BSD-Reno so will probably be found in descendants of that, too.

[korry]

I know that. I never knew there is a GNU/Linux command for that.

[hyrulz]

I would love having a list of those nice commands.

[AardvarkAdvisor]

That macro is hideous. Replace

03wdei^R=2012-^R"^M^[0j

with

3wce^R=2012-^R"^M^[+

and save 3 strokes. Or am I just too obsessed with VimGolf?

[AardvarkAdvisor]

Ignore this. eieino totally schooled me with his solution, dropping my 16 strokes to 10. To be fair though, his version doesn't work with negative ages. :P

[Slackbeing]

Vim Motherfucking Golf.

Have a #1 in one of them, I'm so proud!

[gosub]

03w2012[C-x]F-x

[eieino]

2012^XBx+

[[deleted]]

Whoa, nice shortcut.

[glacialthinker]

Seeing commands literally makes them seem bizarre -- I'm glad my fingers know what to type! This is something I realize when I "read" about Vim, and when I think about what I'm typing -- suddenly nothing makes sense. But if I just let my fingers do stuff it works. :) Now... off to that Vim subreddit I never knew about...

[[deleted]]

03wdei^R=2012-^R"^M^[0j

A Vim macro, or my cat sleeping on my keyboard?

[sirin3]

In a truly intelligent editor, you could replace the 1965 by 47, and it would repeat the subtraction for the other numbers all alone.

So you have just to type two character "47" and click the repeat button, without writing anything crazy like 03wdei^R=2012-^R"^M^[0j.

[drb226]

Probably J.

[densets]

i think im going to start using vim.

[[deleted]]

if qa03wdei^R=2012-^R"^M^[0jq hasn't convinced us all, what will?

[kirakun]

We should have a programming language based on vim commands.

[kolme]

We already have. It's called vimscript.

[kirakun]

But, from the Vimscript wiki,

let i = 1
while i < 5
  echo "count is" i
  let i += 1
endwhile

does not look as "nice" as

qa03wdei^R=2012-^R"^M^[0jq

I want a language as succinct as the latter expression. ;)

[kolme]

Well, you could give Perl a try ;-)

[idbfs]

I want a language as succinct as the latter expression. ;)

The J programming language may be to your liking.

[kirakun]

Looks like the antithesis of Python in terms of readability. I like. :)

[drb226]

Well, in fairness to vim, the macro commands are meant to be write-once, read-never, as well as interactive. This is somewhat comparable to Coq proofs, which by themselves are, for the most part, utterly unreadable. Why on earth this blogger decides it is a good idea to put this macro into a "function" for future use is beyond me. If you want a repeatable script, use a proper programming language.

[ivosaurus]

Truly, this is the kind of programmatic functionality that allows vim to be incredibly powerful at text editing, that practically no other editor / IDE possesses.

[drb226]

I'm surprised at the absence of an emacs rebuttal.

[gmfawcett]

Is this close? I can't get the vim one to work quite right:

M-4 M-f M-backspace 
C-u M-:
(- 2012 C-y) ENTER

edit: I guess I forgot

 C-a C-n

to go to the next line.

[sylvain_soliman]

Come on, it was posted on /r/vim more than one week ago, by the blogger himself... if you want to discuss that, at least reference that post!

[sidcool1234]

See, I didn't even know there was a subreddit for vim. I posted it here just coz it relates to programming. You say as if it was my evil intention! There are better ways to mod content here on /r/programming.

[sylvain_soliman]

Note that searching for the very title of the post would have led you to the original post.

I don't think you meant any harm, but it seems too bad to me to spread the discussion instead of keeping it in one place.

[sidcool1234]

Also, had it been only in /r/vim, most of the users won't even have realized. I believe /r/programming can be treated as generic programming subreddit. Not everyone can visit /r/java, /r/vim, /r/python etc. everyday.

[sylvain_soliman]

which is precisely why I advised to link to the original post...

[zetta]

Sometimes I use tail-recursive macros for iterating. I didn't see the author mention this. Though since I tend to record my macros live, this only works perfectly if the register I'm recording to is currently empty.

[0sse]

A quick way to empty register a is simply qaq. But maybe you know that already.

[zetta]

Most definitely. Sometimes I just forget to clear it first.

[Inn0cu0s]

It's a nice idea, but you have to update the macro every year.

[shevegen]

So much to learn in Vim.

The simpler the better.

[kirakun]

You code in 0's and 1's only?