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Comment by jfager | Hacker News Reader

You should check out the EmacsWiki macro tricks page:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyboardMacrosTricks

From there:

    If you want to produce this list:

    test1
    test2
    test3
    ...

    Do like this:

    C-x r n q           (store the number 1 in register q)
    C-x (               (start macro recording)
    test C-x r i q      (insert contents of register q)
    C-x r + q           (increment register q by 1)
    RET                 (new line)
    C-x )               (stop macro recording)

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The easy way I do it is to make however many copies of "test0" I want, then make a trivial throwaway macro where I move my cursor to the number I want to increment, and hit M-x rolling-increment-number-at-point. (Of course with autocomplete...)

Here's my definitions:

  (defvar *rolling-counter* 0)
  
  (defun rolling-increment-number-at-point ()
    (interactive)
    (incf *rolling-counter*)
    (skip-chars-backward "0123456789")
    (or (looking-at "[0123456789]+")
        (error "No number at point"))
    (replace-match (number-to-string (+ *rolling-counter*
                                        (string-to-number (match-string 0))))))
  
  (defun clear-rolling-history ()
    (interactive)
    (setf *rolling-counter* 0))

Ow, that hurts my brain more than usual. How would one leverage registers with text instead of incremental numbers? (I will have to RTFW later.)

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