I’ve written before about the excellent videos that Emacs NYC produces from their monthly meetings where one of the members gives a talk on some aspect of Emacs. This month, Jacob O’Donnell gives a nice talk on keyboard macros. It’s easiest to view it on YouTube.
As O’Donnell says, there’s not a lot to know about keyboard macros but there are some lessor known corners that can be very useful, such as editing, saving, or naming them. This talk is an excellent introduction that will tell you everything you will probably ever need to know.
Here at Irreal, we sometimes run EmacsGolf challenges and very often the best solutions make use of a keyboard macro. Tim Visher also used them in several of his EmacsGolf videos and I often use them for some repetitive one-off editing job that it’s not worth writing Elisp for. Keyboard macros should be in every Emacser’s toolkit. Usually all you need to remember are the【F3】 and【F4】 keys. For more complex tasks, help is just a【Ctrl+h i】away. I have the keyboard macro Info documentation bookmarked for easy access.