Registers

A Vim macro is a recorded sequence of keystrokes that you replay against a range, and it is the tool that beats sed, awk, and multi-cursor for irregular structural edits. This is the reference post: recording, replaying, applying over ranges, editing a macro as text in a register, recursive macros, and the specific patterns that make macros a daily tool. Fourth and final in the Vim series.

Vim has ten kinds of registers — unnamed, numbered, named, small-delete, read-only, expression, selection, black-hole, alternate-file, and last-search. Most Vim users know two of them and lose work to the other eight. This is the reference post: what each register is for, when it saves you, and the concrete recipes that turn registers from trivia into a daily tool. Third in a four-part Vim series.