Editing Macros

In the executing macros section we identified a few issues with our macro:

1. There are spaces between the tags and the text inside them, and

2. We want to add a j at the end of the macro to automatically move the cursor down a line.

To start, lets hits G and Esc to move the cursor to the bottom of the buffer, then execute :put a to insert the macro we just recorded at the bottom of our buffer:

Lets take a moment to explain the text that was just inserted into the buffer. When we recorded the macro we used these steps:

o<\p><Esc>kO<p><Esc>JJ

but what gets pasted into the buffer is:

o<\p>^[kO<p>^[JJ

what is going on?

While it is convenient for humans to represent keys on by their names, such as <Esc>, terminals represent these keys internally as a sequence of bytes defined by ANSI escape codes. These appear in a terminal as a sequence of characters. For example, the bytes representing the escape key are 0x1b, which is rendered in the terminal as ^[, which explains why this is shown when we insert the macro contents into the buffer.

o<\p>[kO<p>[JJ

Now, back to implementing our edits.

The first thing we want to do is remove the spaces between the tags and text. In the original macro, we used the J command to join lines together. When J joins lines it puts a space between them, which is usually what we would want, but not in this case. We should have used the alternate command gJ, which joins lines but does not add a space between them. We will start by moving the cursor to the first J using fJ, then add a g before it using i followed by g.

Next we want to move to the end of the line and add a g before the second J too. The final change will be to add a j to the end of the macro, so that the cursor moves down one line after executing. This is done by moving to the end of the line with $, then adding the j to the end using a j.

After the edits are made we want to store the updated macro in register a and delete it from the buffer. We can achieve this by switching to normal mode (<Esc>) then moving the cursor to the beginning of the line with 0. Finally, we want to delete text to the end of this line and put it into register a, using "ad$.

These steps are detailed below:

Finally, lets test the updated macro. Lets start by moving the cursor up to the second line with 4k, then execute the macro using @a,

At this point our macro is working as expected. The only remaining task is to manually remove the spaces from line 1, and we are done.