The topic that wouldn’t die. It started with a quick post on Sacha’s solution to a problem posed by David Pape. I thought it was a nice solution but then 0-_-0_ pointed out that abo-abo had already solved this problem with his tiny library. So I wrote about that and prepared to move on.
I was not allowed to. Frequent commenter Phil remarked in my original post that he would use a keyboard macro. He suggested that that would make sense for those of us who who seldom need to enter a sequence of ranges like Pape. In Pape’s case this was something that he needed to do a lot so a solution like Sacha’s or abo-abo’s make sense. I agree with Phil. A keyboard macro is exactly how I would solve this problem given that I seldom have it.
This seems pretty obvious and might not be worth writing about except that Phil’s solution showed me something that I didn’t know: You can set the initial value of the counter with a Ctrl+u n where n is the desired initial value. That’s a lot easier than using Ctrl+x Ctrl+k Ctrl+c to do the job.
As a final note, I think that Phil had a typo in his macro. As far as I can tell it should be
C-u 47 <f3> # <f3> , SPC <f4> <f4> <f4> <f4> <f4> <f4> <f4> <f4>
At least that’s what works for me.
It turns out that I regularly use a macro with a counter so I’m really happy to learn that the counter can be set so easily.