Sometimes you make a sick macro, and you want to keep it because you might find it useful later. For example turning a line into a markdown todo item. This is possible in neovim with the function setreg, to set a register. Read on how to use it.
First lets record a macro to turn the current line into a markdown todo. Press q t to record the macro into the t registry. Press I then type - [ ], press escape and then press j, then press q to stop recording. (Ending a macro with j is good to make it easier to repeat the macro.)
Now get the contents of the registry by pressing "tp
You will get something like this: I- [ ] ^[j. (Note that ^[ should be a single character, representing escape, but its not rendered by browsers, so I changed it to the two separate characters. But this means copying the macro directly from this blogpost will not work.)
Now you only need to register the macro in a file that is loaded by neovim. I have a file called macros.lua in lua/config. For this example it might be better to put it in after/ftplugin/markdown.lua, then it only loads when you open a markdown file.
Add the following to your macro file:
vim.fn.setreg("t", "I- [ ] ^[j")
Over time you will have a nice library of useful macros.
Using vim.fn.setreg is also how I edit a macro, just because I never learned how to do it the “normal” way. 🤷