How can I save evil-mode (vim style) macros to my init.el?

Solution 1:

Evil-mode macros are not special, they are just ordinary Emacs macros and you save them the same way, but you'll need to do some special work to get them into the evil registers.

Let's walk through an example:

In a buffer, do qfifoobarESCq. This will save a macro into the f register that inserts foobar into the buffer.

Now run M-xname-last-kbd-macroRETmymacroRET.

Go to your init.el file and do M-xinsert-kbd-macroRETmymacroRET.

This will dump your macro out into an fset call.

(fset 'mymacro [?i ?f ?o ?o ?b ?a ?r escape])

If you place this in your init.el you will have access to the command mymacro from M-x.

But, we saved this into register f and we want it to be there at each startup. You need to extract the macro vector from the code above and save that to a register in your init.el like this:

;; make sure this is done after evil-mode has been loaded
(evil-set-register ?f [?i ?f ?o ?o ?b ?a ?r escape])

Now you will have access to it from @!

See the docs about naming and inserting macros as text

Solution 2:

I faced this problem and write a advice for evil-paste-after command in another question :

(defun evil-paste-kbd-macro-advice (&rest argv)
  "make evil paste kbd-macro if register content is a macro.
this function check whether content is a macro by:
 1. equal to `last-kbd-macro'
 2. is a vector but not string
 3. contain unprintable character"
  (if (and (>= (length argv) 2)
           (second argv))
      (let* ((register (second argv))
             (register-pair (assoc register register-alist))
             (content (if register-pair (cdr register-pair))))
        (if (and content
                 (or (eq last-kbd-macro content)
                     (vectorp content)
                     (string-match "[^\t[:print:]\n\r]" content)))
            (let ((last-kbd-macro content))
              (forward-line)
              (beginning-of-line)
              (insert-kbd-macro '##)
              (forward-line -2)
              (search-forward "setq last-kbd-macro")
              (replace-match "execute-kbd-macro")
              t)))))
(advice-add 'evil-paste-after :before-until
            'evil-paste-kbd-macro-advice)

This advice make evil p command be able to paste macro in register, even if macro contain 'return or 'backspace.