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Comment by jphackworth | Hacker News Reader

One feature of Emacs that I wish IDEs would or could adopt is macros. It really enables a larger set of refactorings when you can repeat any text transformation. You really need non-popup find-this-string, though.

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    One feature of Emacs that I wish IDEs would or could
    adopt is macros

I think you'll need to have a reflective language as your foundation to do this as well as emacs. It doesn't have to be a lisp - io language has this property as well. But otherwise the IDE developers need to consciously build and expose functionality. Despite this amount of work, users will keep running into things they hadn't thought of and which won't be accessible (unless you build a plugin - a similar concept).

I suspect he means keyboard macros, as opposed to macros defined in emacs lisp using forms like defmacro. Keyboard macros allow you to record an arbitrary sequence of actions, whereas lisp macros allow you to perform arbitrary transformations on your code. I could be wrong though.

Still, keyboard macros could be amazingly useful in an IDE setting.

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