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.