Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Re: Macro-keys

> I was just wondering why the (more-easily typed) 'q' button is mapped by default to *record* a macro and the '@' character to actually "play" the macro back....

The reason is that this is vi compatible. vi could play macros with @, but could not record them, one had to yank (or delete) into a register before playing the contents as a macro. The "more-easily typed" q was one of the few keys not used by vi. (The other letters were g, v and z, somewhat heavily used by vim.)

vi compatiblity is taken very seriously by vim. I speculate that's partly because there's a vi spec in POSIX and vim enables Gnu/Linux to be POSIX, so to speak.

Regards, John

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