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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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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