“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Hofstadter’s Law (via)
Keyboard Macros: The greatest feature you’ve never used.
You might have read my previous post on podcasts and wondered how much time I’ve spent creating that list with its URLs and short descriptions etc.
Fortunably/regrettably (depending on wether you liked that post) this is a matter of minutes thanks to the wonderful invention of Keyboard Macros (available in Textmate and Emacs and probably others).
So if you’re willing to play along and learn something that will save you time (promised) when working with text, please be so kind to copy the text in this file.
In case you’re curious that’s the result of selecting my podcasts in iTunes (pic), copy and a paste.
I’m assuming you’ve pasted my text in your favorite editor (Emacs will get you bonuspoints).
Emacs
M-x kmacro-start-macro-or-insert-counter (bound to F3) to start the macro
M-x kmacro-end-or-call-macro (bound to F4) to stop/call the macro
Textmate
Take a look in the Bundles-menu-item, look at the shortcut for starting a Macro, memorize it (you can do this entire thing without ever touching the mouse, think of the kittens!).
Let’s dig in
(I’m assuming your caret is on the first line of the file, if it isn’t please do so)
The keyboard commands you need to hit:
| Emacs | Textmate | What am I doing? |
|---|---|---|
| F3 | Alt-Command-M | Start recording the macro |
| C-a | Position caret a beginning of line | |
| Press # two times | Typing 2 hashes | |
| C-s (incr search) | Command-F | Looking for the tab char |
Since the text is delimited by tabs, we need to look for the tab character to move our caret along for our next action. In Textmate we can do this by using Find with a regex
In Emacs we can do an incremental search and enter a tab by using the quoted-insert command (bound to C-q), so C-s C-q tab will do the trick. Great! We’ve found the tab character, moving on.
| Emacs | Textmate | What am I doing? |
|---|---|---|
| Press # two times | Typing 2 hashes (to end markdown title) | |
| C-d (two times) | Forward deletes the next two tabs | |
| Press return | Moving to a new line | |
| Press > once | Creating a markdown blockquote | |
| Command-F | C-s (incr search) | Looking for the tab char (remember last time) |
| C-d | Deletes tab char | |
| Return | Moving to a new line | |
| Type `[link](` | Creating markdown link | |
| C-e | Move to end of line | |
| Type `)` | Ending the link | |
| Press returning | Adding another line | |
| C-n | Moving caret to the next line | |
| F4 | Control-Command-M | Stop recording the macro |
Phiew. Glad that’s done. What we’ve done now is created a Keyboard Macro, think of it as a small program defined by keystrokes, every keystroke you press in a macro is a command. This way you can quickly create throwaway string manipulation programs.
Knowing your way around a keyboard is pretty vital to the whole damn operation, so (this might come in handy).
Now to execute the “program”.
| Emacs | Textmate | What am I doing? |
|---|---|---|
| F4 | Command-Shift-M | Executes the macro. |
Now repeat this step as many times as necessary. See what we’ve done, isn’t that almost indistinguishable from magic.
Notes
- It’s always handy to start a macro with a C-a to know exactly where you start.
- If you mistype, just undo and move on. The macro will do this undo each and every time, but it’s a program; it won’t care.
- Keyboard shortcuts are your friend, learn them.
- This isn’t just for humongous amounts of text, it will work wonders on lists etc. as well
