Is there a way to display a macro list similar to displaying your mappings in Vim?

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I know there is a way to list mappings via :map (or :imap, :cmap, etc.), but I can't find a way to list macros I have stored in my vimrc file (as in let @a = 'blahblah').

Is there a way to do this without having to manually looking inside it (via :split [myvimrcfile] or whatever way)?

Also, if it is possible, is there a way to attach some sort of documentation that would display with the macro to explain what it is for? I have a handful that I use quite a bit, but about 6 weeks apart. It would be nice to just quickly list them along with a comment that tells me what the macro does (or even just a name so I make sure I use the right one).

Thanks

vi macros vim
4 Answers

The OP asked, "is there a way to attach some sort of documentation that would display with the macro to explain what it is for?"

I have found VI / VIM macros extremely obtuse to understand even a week after I've written them, so I heartily support the idea of documentation. I have a suggestion for that, in two parts.

First is the process of documenting the macro in your .vimrc. I've developed the following .vimrc comment format that helps me understand, a week or a year or more later, what a macro is supposed to be doing. E.g.:

"
"= GENERIC CLIPBOARD YANK  <F2>y (Y for Yank)
"= Yank the entire contents of the file into the clipboard; quit without saving.
"
"define F2 followed by y to be:
"|      Go to line 1.
"|      | From there, into the * buffer (system clipboard),
"|      | | yank to the end of the file.
"|      | | | Go to sleep for 1 second (to allow the clipboard to be updated).
"|      | | | |  Quit without saving the file.
"|      | | | |  |
map #2y 1G"*yG1gs:q!<CR>
"-------"-"-"-"--"------

Second, I am imagining that Jakub's ShowMacros() function above could be modified to grep a specific set of Help lines for each macro that would be in the file along with the definition, much the way the above command-line breakdown is attached to the definition, that would provide the needed User Help.

I've flagged two lines above with "= at the beginning of each, so that they can become the User Help. Then Jakub's grep command would search for "^\"= ". Here's the command I used. I'm not sure if the -E for Extended Regular Expressions is needed and the -B 1 is a nice touch to include one line previous to a matching sequence, so here I have an explicitly empty comment line.

In my vimrc, I only needed one backslash, for the initial parsing of the definitions. Here's the line, replacing the one in Jakub's function definition above:

    exe 'r!' . 'grep -B 1 -E "^\"= " ~/.vimrc'

Thanks to Jakub's hint, I now can generate help from my .vimrc in pretty much exactly the way the OP is asking for. I've been using vi since 1983, so I'm pretty stoked.

Thanks Jakub!

IHTH,

August

user_22682520
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