[comp.emacs] name-last-kbd-macro, et al

dsill@NSWC-OAS.ARPA (Dave Sill) (08/14/87)

First, I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my inquiry
concerning user-defined functions in Emacs.  I tried to reply
personally to each of you, but some of the replies bounced.

I was unaware that GNU Emacs had a facility for naming and saving
macros.  I may never live down the shame of not reading TFM.  Well,
since I don't have TFM in printed form, maybe that should be TFI for
"info".  I'm also the only one using Emacs here (70+ machines, 1200+
users) so I didn't have anybody here to ask.

GNU Emacs's macro saving facility is nice, but what I really had in
mind was saving the macros as elisp functions.  There are a couple of
reasons for this.  First, the fact that macros are currently
represented by strings of keystrokes causes them to be tied to the
bindings in effect when the macro was created.  I understand the
command "insert-kbd-macro" under version 18.XX has a provision for
including key binding information with the macro, but that sounds like
a bit of a kludge to me.  Second, macros rendered in lisp would be
easier to read and modify, even by a non-lisper like myself, than
strings of keystrokes.

Ron Natalie mentioned that UniPress Emacs has such a feature and that
it has trouble with commands that prompt from the minibuffer.  Would
it be possible to do it cleanly under GNU Emacs?

BTW, I'm running 17.64 on a CCI Power 6/32 (tahoe) which is unable to
compile 18.XX.