registereditor

Vim Macros are awesome. But it's hard to get it right on the first try.

-- dohsimpson 2015

I couldn't agree more, so I tried his plugin vim-macroeditor, and it was almost perfect.

It's a tiny plugin, 27 lines of VimScript, so it's easy to edit. I've rewritten it in Lua and modified the following:

Now you can edit any register, not just macros
- Though the best use is for editing macros, editing other types of registers is basically the same thing, so just allow it
The command is :R[egisterEdit]
- Best to use with just :R
Checks that argument is a valid register
No warnings when editing a register that wasn't already set
Allows more than one window open at the same time
Window shows register name in statusline
Window height is set based on number of lines in register
Always splits window below

Big thanks to dohsimpson for sharing the original plugin.

Installation

With lazy.nvim:

{
    'tuurep/registereditor',
}

Start editing a register with :R <register>

Update <register> contents with :wq

Or discard changes with :q!

When you need to insert special characters like <Esc> (displayed as ^[) in a macro, press Ctrl + v in insert mode followed by Esc

Newlines in registers are stored as ^J (see :h NL-used-for-Nul). This causes an actual Ctrl + j keypress in a macro.

That's why macros should be written only on the first line of the registereditor buffer with no empty lines after.

When a newline at the end of the register is desired, the registereditor buffer should end in an empty line.

This plugin is in essence a less cumbersome alternative to one of the following methods:

Example register q

On the command line:
- :let @q = "<C-r>q"
- Register q contents are pasted on commandline for editing
Temporarily pasting to a buffer for editing:
- "qp
- Edit inside buffer
- Yank it back using something like:
  - "qy . . .
  - "qd . . .