Vmacro

What is this program

Vmacro is a simple utility to execute vim style macros on each line of a file. I am not able to include all commands of vim yet. The tool will be much more faster than doing it inside vim. The idea was that you give certain vim macros seperated by a delimeter and the program will execute that macro on each line. It can also operate on input coming from stdin.

Remember!

The behaviour of the commands might not be exactly like in vim. The goal was to create a tool that does it similar to vim. Also there might be some bugs. This tool was created to learn more about how vim macros might work and beacause how slow vim macros can be when done over many lines.

Supported movements and actions

Movments

• w Word forward
• b Word backward
• l Character forward
• h Character backward
• ^ Start of line
• f Find character
• F Find character backward
• t Till character
• T Till character backward
• $ End of line
• / Search forwards
• ? Search backward

Actions

• i Insert characters at cursor
• d Delete action (usually assciated with a movement)
• y Yank (copy) (can be given movements)
• p Paste yanked text at cursor
• P Paste yanked text before cursor

With most of these movments you can give a count of how many times to repeat it. An action can also given to it. Currently there is only delete and insert.

Options

• -d Delimeter to use when using multiple macros
• -f Name of file to read from (If not given read from stdin)
• -c Number of times to repeat macro
• -m The macro to execute on each line

Examples

The -p flag will prettify the output, showing the location of the cursor. Omit it if you are outputting to a file instead. The -c flag will repeat the given macro a given number of times

./vmacro -f test1 -m "$;4db;h;i Hello;f.;dh" -d ";" -p 
./vmacro -f test.txt -m "2l;dw" -d ";"
./vmacro -f test.txt -m "2dw" -c 3 > test1.txt

How to compile

The Project has a simple Makefile to execute The Makefile has two options debug (which includes debug symbols) and all (compiler optimizations turned on). If you are going to use the tool i highly recommend to use make all command.

$ make debug
$ ./vmacro -f test.txt -m "3fp;l;d$" -d";" -p 
$ |I am so happy this p|
                      ^

Performance

One of the goals of this tool was to make it be able to handle a lot of lines easily. The program in itself is fast. But it could be faster. Any kind of deleting would obviously be slower than not doing it, as you constantly creating new buffers to store lines and identifying the words again.

Without compiler optimiztions

For 5000000 lines

$ time ./vmacro -f test1 -m "$;4db;h;i Hello;f.;dh" -d ";" > /dev/null
real    0m41.938s
user    0m41.747s
sys     0m0.099s

With compiler optimizations

For 5000000 lines

$ time ./vmacro -f test1 -m "$;4db;h;i Hello;f.;dh" -d ";" > /dev/null
real    0m15.629s
user    0m15.516s
sys     0m0.081s

Contributing

If anyone wishes to contribute. You are welcome to do so by opening a pull request. Anyone is free to use this tool.