Quick One-Off Macros

Recording macros can a a bit of a slog, especially when you only want to quickly repeat a sequence of 2-3 commands. First, you type qa to record (into register a). Do you commands, and then q to stop recording. Then you play the recording via @a once, and for further repetitions you do @@.

With neovim, at least the last part can be simplified, since there is Q available for triggering the last recording made (instead of the barely used Ex Mode mapping in vanilla vim). But still, for convenience one might want to trigger a quick, one-off recording with just one keystroke, without having to think which register is still free.

Mapping a key to q{letter} is also tricky, since q{letter} starts a recording, but only q is required to stop a recording, meaning you get an extra undesired keystroke triggered every time. So to achieve a one-key-recording-start, we have to modify the mapping while recording. Curiously, there is no "recording mode" in vim, so we have to rely on the vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd events "RecordingEnter" and "RecordingLeave" to instead. The first vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd is also triggered by "VimEnter", to set the keybinding before a recording has been made. And purely as a safety net, we do not use Q to trigger the last recording for the quick one-off recording, but @{letter} to avoid accidentally triggering a different macro we may make.

 1vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("recording", {})
 2vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({"RecordingLeave", "VimEnter"}, {
 3	group = "recording",
 4	callback = function() vim.keymap.set("n", "0", "qz") end
 5})
 6vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("RecordingEnter", {
 7	group = "recording",
 8	callback = function() vim.keymap.set("n", "0", "q") end
 9})
10vim.keymap.set("n", "9", "@z")

I personally have shadow-mapped this to 0 and 9, since I barely use 0, and also never use counts as high as 9; using q and Q might be more intuitive for others I assume. (I use q as the comment operator gc.)

Thanks to @Craftidore for inspiring this one. 😊