Posted: 2021-05-05

Create a persistent macro in JOVE Micro Emacs

Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs

JOVE is Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs, a Micro Emacs.

JOVE is a Micro Emacs that is small, fast, and has some nice options.

One of the options is to create keyboard macros and write them to a file. This way you can make your keyboard macros persistent.

I wanted to setup a small macro that inserts a time stamp.

The apropos function in JOVE is great way to discover the available functions.

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD package of JOVE doesn't come with all the documentation, this is why the describe-command function doesn't work.

So it took some time to figure out how to do this.

This are the steps by which I was able to create a persistent macro.

Start the recording of your macro with

^X-(

(which stands for "Ctrl-c (" ).

End the recording of your macro with

^X-)

You can test the macro with

^X-e

Use the function

M-x name-kbd-macro

To name your last recorded macro.

Just give it a descriptive name.

Invoke the function

M-x write-macros-to-file

and supply a filename, like "/tmp/my-macro".

JOVE will write the known named macros to this file, including your fresh created and named macro.

I didn't have a personal initialization file, so I had to create one first. For this, I copied the system initialization file to my home directory:

cp /usr/local/share/jove/jove.rc ~/.joverc

Now you can copy the line with your macro from "/tmp/my-macro" to your ~/.joverc.

Add a line to .joverc in which you create the key binding.

bind-macro-to-key my-great-macro ^X^T

In this line above, the macro named "my-great-macro" is bound to ^X^T (Ctrl-x Ctrl-t).

Close JOVE and open it again, to make it read your .joverc and test to see if your defined key binding indeed invoke the macro.

Have fun !