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From: wunder@hpcea.HP.COM (Walter Underwood)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: regular expressions and operations other than replace
Message-ID: <2280008@hpcea.HP.COM>
Date: Tue, 21-Oct-86 15:19:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: hpcea.2280008
Posted: Tue Oct 21 15:19:36 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Oct-86 00:42:14 EDT
References: <1168@peregrine.UUCP>
Organization: HP Corp. Engineering - Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 16

> Since I have switched from vi to EMACS, there is one thing that I missed
> more than anything else.  The ability to perform an operation on all
> the lines that met a particular criteria(specified by a regular expression).
> 
> Mike Wexler

Just use keyboard macros.  Start the macro, do a regex search, do the action,
and close the macro.  Give it a very large arg (type ^U ten times) and
then execute the macro.  Voila!  Your buffer has been munged!

I had the same problem when converting from vi, but I find that keyboard
macros are actually more powerful than regular expressions, and easier to
specify.  They are also much easier to teach to a novice.

wunderwood
wunder@hplabs