Praveen's Blog

An Eternal Quest for Incremental Improvement

Simple GNU Emacs keyboard macro demonstration

My obsession for GNU Emacs has grown over years to an extent where I managed to get a significant amount of users to adopt Emacs. In the past 10 years, I have learned a lot of nice tricks that I can do on Emacs to improve my productivity. So, I have decided to create a series of screencasts demonstrating some of those.

I will start with a very simple one, macros. Quoting from Emacs documentation, "A keyboard macro is a command defined by an Emacs user to stand for another sequence of keys. For example, if you discover that you are about to type C-n M-d C-d forty times, you can speed your work by defining a keyboard macro to do C-n M-d C-d, and then executing it 39 more times.

In this demo, I have taken a real world example where you have to add C++ class member variables and accessors. There are other efficient ways to do such tasks in GNU Emacs. I personally use yasnippets to do these things. However, this approach is shown just to demonstrate keyboard macros. To supplement this video, please take a look at the keyboard macro documentation that is available within Emacs.


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