Macro’s in vim

I have to admit that up to now, I was never using macros in vim and I neither saw the need for using them. Macro reminded me somehow of a dark past in ms-office products that I rather want to forget ;)

Problem at hand: Create a tab separated sequence of increasing integers in a text file

While I immediately turned to vim, it took some quality google time to realize that macros could be the solution. Then the path to a working macro was pretty straight forward. I record the step for one yank/paste/increase step and apply it with the required number of repetition as macro to a number. Macro recording in vim starts with q followed by another character to name the macro. Recording ends by pressing again q.

A small issue that had to be solved was yanking of whole, multi digit numbers. Basically, one uses the ‘yank word’ yw command. However, for this to work properly, the cursor should be positioned on the left most digit of the number. So the actual problem is to move to the first character of a word, independent whether the word has one or many characters (or in this case digits). A viable solution is the visual select modus: The combination viwo<esc> will do the trick to select the whole multi digit number.

The full sequence of key strokes to record the macro

qq
viwo<Esc>
yw
$
a
c-v
<Tab>
<Esc>
p
c-a
q

Applying the macro

If a sequence of numbers from 1 to 20 has to be generated, initially a 1 is inserted. With the cursor standing on the 1, 19@q is then entered.

This will apply the macro q 19 times:

1   2   3   4   5   6   7  8   9   10  11   12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20