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Comment by fakedrake | Hacker News Reader

Good to know about ed! Since noone else has mentioned this, emacs' keyboard macros seem much easier to me especially since more than the basic editing stuff off awk/ed/sed i can leverage all the editor extensions and modifications i have accumulated over the years. That is unless its tens of thousands of files and the edit is exceptionally simple. I would write a script in that case too.

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Since discovering them, I use Emacs keyboard macros all the time.

Let's say I have:

  key   value
  salt  pepper
  fish  chips
  vodka orange
  rum   cola

and I want the second column in uppercase.

<F3> to start recording a macro. Alt →, → to position the cursor at "v" (or just →→→→→→ if this is a fixed width column), then Alt U to uppercase the next word. → to move the cursor one forward, to the start of the next line. <F4> to finish recording the macro.

Then press <F4> five times to run the macro five times.

(Explanation intended for users who've never used Emacs before. Of course, there are optimizations.)

The equivalent in vim is:

• qq to start recording a macro in register q,

• w to jump to the second word,

• gUaw to "go uppercase a word",

• j to move to next line (↓ works as well),

• q to stop recording,

• 5@q to apply macro in register q five times.

But in this example I would have probably used ex command:

    :%normal wgUaw

(for every line do as if I had typed wgUaw) or visualy selected the second column as a block and just pressed U.

I'm genuinely interested in someone showing how to do this kind of trasformation in popular modern editors such as Atom and VSCode. Is there such a flexible way as in the classic editors?

The main reason i am not moving to something more trendy are kbd macros and the fact that emacs is designed to be equal parts runtime and editor. I think that for most purposes emacs and vim are equivalent but virtually all modern editors are lacking compared to a well good emacs/vim configuration.

You can do it using multiple cursors. On Sublime, you place the cursor on beginning of “value”, then press Ctrl+Shift+Down until the end - there will be a cursor on every line. Then you press Ctrl+Right to select all values on the second column. Then press Ctrl+P and choose “Convert to Upper Case”, or just Ctrl+KU.

Microoptimizing a couple of things, I'd do this from the top of the buffer:

    <F3> M-f M-u C-n C-a C-0 <F4>

I particularly like combining the "finish recording" and "running the macro" steps into a single <F4>. Plus, using a numeric argument of 0 seems better than counting lines.

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