Re: Emacs and vim analogs

[Ken Goldman <kgold@watson.ibm.com>]

M G Berberich wrote:
>>"Clinton Curry" <clintonc@uab.edu> writes:

> 
>>>2) Redo-last-change.  In Vim, if you make a change, pressing "."
>>>will make the change again.  Is there something analogous in Emacs,
>>>aside from defining a macro?
>>
>>Either C-x M-ESC or C-x z, depending on your requirements.
> 
> 
> You probably mean C-x ESC ESC or C-x M-: . C-x M-ESC simply quits my
> emacs. But both are not doing what '.' does in vim. With vims . you
> can repeate commands like “replace next three word with …”, “indent 5
> lines”, “append … to line” or “replace rest of line with …” 
> (where … stands for some text). This is not possible with emacs
> because there is no implicit grouping of inserted characters, so C-x z
> repeats the last character typed, which is completely useless.

The statement "This is not possible with emacs" is typically false.

Complex commands such as you describe are easily done with keyboard 
macros.  There are so useful that I have the start, end, and execute 
functions assigned to function keys.