Vim macro of the week

The other day I was putting together an ad-hock eslint configuration where I had just one JS file for a prototype page. I was inside a git repo and I didn’t want to have additional files, so I kind of resisted the idea to have a .eslintrc file, but I can have a Makefile — I have that in my ~/.gitignore, so I can easily add one here and have all the messy bits hidden inside it:

default: lint

lint:
    eslint checkout.js

So now I can say make or m and have my JS file linted. Cool, but how do I add eslint rules? It turnes out that it allows me make all the configuration I want by passing arguments, so to add one rule at a time by passing them as separate --rule arguments:

eslint \
  --rule 'comma-dangle: [2, "never"]' \
  --rule 'no-cond-assign: 2' \
  ...
  checkout.js

Messy, but good enough for this context. After typing in 5 of those lines of --rule 'something' I was wondering how can I automate this. A vim macro was the first thing that came to mind so being on such a line, I wanted to copy-paste it, and then change the thing inside the quotes to whatever I have just copied from the rules page.

So I started with this:

qq — start recording a macro named q
yyp — duplicate the line
ci' — delete what’s inside the quotes and switch to insert mode
hit Command-V to paste whatever I had in the OS clipboard
hit Esc to return to command mode and prepare for the next iteration
q to finish the recording

Now to use it:

copy another rule into OS clipboard
switch to vim and hit @q to run the q macro that I just recorded

Nope. The ^V was taken by vim literally: to just type in the characters that I then had in the OS clipboard. So, to make it work, I had to explicitly tell vim “paste the contents of the OS clipboard here” which in its lingo is ^R+ — this while in insert mode. So I re-recorded the macro as above and just replaced ^V with ^R+:

qqyypci'^R+<esc>q

That worked! Now I can: switch to browser, copy, and the just switch to vim and hit @@ to have another rule added. 8-)

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