Re: Convert an existing keyboard macro to elisp code?

[PJ Weisberg <pj@irregularexpressions.net>]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:10 AM, Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, the answer was more a less a 'NO'(or 'YOU HAVE TO WRITE
> IT YOURSELF').
>
> Since Emacs is a pretty dynamic project, I thought I give it another try
> on the mailing list - maybe this feature request has been implemented in
> the meantime by somebody?

If it were just a matter of reading the key sequence and mapping it to
functions it wouldn't be too bad, but the more I think about this, the
more it seems like a rat hole.  How would you translate

(fset 'my-macro
   [?\M-x ?m ?a ?g tab ?i ?t tab ?s ?t tab ?t tab return ?m ?a tab return])

into

(defun my-macro ()
  (interactive)
  (magit-status "c:/Users/PJ/Documents/magit/"))

?

You would need to know what auto-completion happened when the user
pressed tab, and then you would need to know how the function
translated its user input into interactive arguments.  I don't think
there's a way to do it without running the macro and (somehow)
watching what happens.  And that could have unpleasant side effects.

And this particular example wouldn't even be portable, since when I
type "M-x magit-status RET magit RET", Magit actually does some magic
to translate that into a full path.  So on my other machine, the
proper definition of that macro would be

(defun my-macro ()
  (interactive)
  (magit-status "/home/pj/source-code/magit"))


And that doesn't even take into account different keymaps.

-PJ

Gehm's Corollary to Clark's Law: Any technology distinguishable from
magic is insufficiently advanced.