VimGolf In Emacs: A Numbered List

The conventional wisdom is that Vim is much more efficient—at least in keystrokes—than Emacs. In working the various VimGolf challenges and reading (or watching) other peoples’ solutions I’ve found that that’s often true but not always. A non-trivial part of the time Emacs can do much better than Vim. This challenge is an example of that.

This VimGolf challenge is to convert a pandoc unordered list to a numbered list. That’s extraordinarily simple if we’re using Org mode but even treating the file as just text we can still do better. The challenge is to take the starting file

My cursor happens to be on this line

## Here is my unordered list
   * item 1
      + it has some sub-items
         - sometimes it has sub-sub-items
      - i list some information about it
   * here is another item
   * and another
      - with some random sub-item
      - maybe with something in **bold** to make asterisks suck
   * woohoo I'm listing stuff like mad
   * I'm a mad pandoc'ing fool
      - long-live **John MacFarlane**!
      + reasons why pandoc is awesome
         - there's just too many list
         - but i'll put some more sub-sub-items for example
         - superfluous - and + to make matching them a pain
   * woo look at these sexy bullet points
   * you almost don't want to turn them into integers
   * but then you do because you know it's the right thing to do

## Here's some other stuff in the file
   * blah blah blah
   * maybe I should go with #. but then it's not readable in txt format

and make part of it numbered.

My cursor happens to be on this line

## Here is my unordered list
   1. item 1
      + it has some sub-items
         - sometimes it has sub-sub-items
      - i list some information about it
   2. here is another item
   3. and another
      - with some random sub-item
      - maybe with something in **bold** to make asterisks suck
   4. woohoo I'm listing stuff like mad
   5. I'm a mad pandoc'ing fool
      - long-live **John MacFarlane**!
      + reasons why pandoc is awesome
         - there's just too many list
         - but i'll put some more sub-sub-items for example
         - superfluous - and + to make matching them a pain
   6. woo look at these sexy bullet points
   7. you almost don't want to turn them into integers
   8. but then you do because you know it's the right thing to do

## Here's some other stuff in the file
   * blah blah blah
   * maybe I should go with #. but then it's not readable in txt format

The best Vim solution is 20 keystrokes. Here’s my solution that does it in 12.

Of course, if we treat the starting file as an Org buffer we can do it in 4.