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From: mercer@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: vi @-macros
Message-ID: <1620@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM>
Date: 11 Oct 89 18:48:04 GMT
References: <754@trlluna.trl.oz>
Reply-To: mercer@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer)
Organization: NCR Comten, Inc.
Lines: 58
Keywords:

In article <754@trlluna.trl.oz> keck@shiva.trl.oz (Brian Keck) writes:
:I have a question about vi @-macros
:
:I know that if I insert a line 
:  oabcESC
:in the main buffer and move it to the buffer called "a" by saying
:  "add
:then I can insert "abc" by saying
:  @a
:
:But can I define @-macros in my .exrc file ?
:If my .exrc file is
:  a
:  oabcESC
:  .
:then vi dumps core.
:
:Thanks
:
:Brian Keck                 ACSnet[Internet]: keck@trlsasb.oz[.au]
:Telecom Australia Research                Phone: +1 61 3 541 6407
:P.O. Box 249 Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia                        
:Brian Keck                 ACSnet[Internet]: keck@trlsasb.oz[.au]
:Telecom Australia Research                Phone: +1 61 3 541 6407
:P.O. Box 249 Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia                        

Oddly enough,  I've had need to do this very thing.  Believe me,  it
tore me up in knots before I stumbled on the answers.  We needed to preload
a bunch of macros tied to our pfkeys because we perceived a storage
problem with macro space.  Turned out,  we only had the problem when
editing in our HOME directories.  our HOME/.exrc was being entered
twice - once as the HOME/.exrc and the second time as ./.exrc.  We
finally solved that problem by moving almost all editable files out
of HOME and into more appropriate subdirectories.

Meanwhile,  we stumbled onto the answer to the above puzzle.  Below
is a sample .exrc file:


e tmpBuf                # open a temporary file - this prevents core
0a                      # append after zero
:!echo it worked        # load command to temp file
.                       # EOF
1d a                    # delete line 1 into buffer a
w! /dev/null            # save file to /dev/null: this unblocks exrc processing

The file you are editing is only opened after exrc processing.

I hope this helps.  I tried it out and it seems to work on my system. 
I can't access the system the actual code was written for (they're
having modem problems).  When I can,  I'll go look over my old
files and make sure there aren't any sneaky refinements I overlooked.


-- 

Dan Mercer
Reply-To: mercer@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer)