#Emacs macros code#

#Emacs macros code#

insert macro code into buffer insert-kbd-macro macro-name.perform macro (start with f3, then do your stuff and return to where you started, then stop recording with ).I'd try it myself, but my emacs build is slightly broken at the moment.Courtesy of gnu manual, we can permanently save a keyboard macro for future use: You could try patching make_event_array to use CHAR_ALT instead of CHAR_META, so that it ignores all modifier keys, and see if that improves the situation at all. Emacs has for at least the last 27 years output virtually all keyboard macros as vectors, unless they contained only ascii characters with no modifier keys, and only if the macro had not been named with kmacro-name-last-macro (because then it would output the form evaluating to a lambda).

So, I conclude that you either had a really old version of Emacs, or that your memory is faulty, or that there's something else going on (such as modifications to the OSX port of Emacs that you used to use). The check against CHAR_META in make_event_array was also added in 1993 (in commit 736471d1) prior to that it accepted any character less than 256. CHAR_META has had the highest value since the constant was introduced in 1993, but prior to that it's really hard to tell. However, I notice that CHAR_META is the highest bit all the other modifier bits have lower values than CHAR_META. Here's the code from alloc.c, line 3672: for (i = 0 i = 0200)

It's done this since the code was introduced in commit 7146af97 in 1991, so I suppose the comments about checking the type 'in case Lisp code changed it' was somewhat mistaken. It only creates a string if all the characters are less than 128 after masking off the CHAR_META bit 'and all the bits above it. This function creates either a string or a vector. There's just one last place to look: end_kbd_macro sets last-kbd-macro to the newly-defined macro using a function make_event_array. However, this particular code is only used when appending new keystrokes to the end of the most recently-recorded macro, and it converts the string back into a vector. The comment says 'Check the type of last-kbd-macro in case Lisp code changed it.', so perhaps there was some lisp code running around which replaced the value of last-kbd-macro with a string instead of a vector. However, in 1999 in commit f8a4db7d code was added to start-kdb-macro that checked to see if the current value of last-kbd-macro was a string.

last-kbd-macro has been a vector of keys since at least 1995. Prior to this change name-last-kbd-macro simply fset your choosen name with the value of last-kbd-macro. (This is the lambda form that insert-kbd-macro checks for). kmacro-name-last-macro has since 2004 always created a definition which is a lambda containing a vector, like this: (lambda The last change to the name-last-kbd-macro was commit 4f779ff8 in 2017, when it was removed and made an alias of kmacro-name-last-macro. If the macro definition is a lambda, then the body of the macro will be printed as a call to kmacro-lambda-form which builds the same lambda. If it's a vector, then it outputs the form you now get. If the macro definition is a string, then it outputs the form you are used to seeing. Insert-kbd-macro can insert a number of different forms, but ultimately the definition of the macro can be either a string, a vector, or a lambda.