Replaying Vim Macros

2016-12-03
programming, emacs, vim

I’ve been using Vim (and now, Emacs with Evil mode) for years — and still, every once in a while I get a pleasant surprise. Today I learned that you can replay macros from Visual Line mode! So you don’t always have to record something like j0 at the end of your macro to get down to the next line. I.e., after recording your macro for just 1 line, select other lines that you want to replay the macro against with Visual Line mode (V). To replay, do

:'<,'>g/^/norm @q

(assuming that you recorded your macro into the q register with qq...q).

Thanks to Chris McCord for the tip (seek to about 3:20 in the video).