Emacs repeat string n times

Question

I'm learning the basics of navigating/editing in Emacs and I'm curious how one could accomplish the following task:

Let's say I want to repeat it five times to generate 'bla bla bla bla bla '. I tried...

C-u 5 bla

...but the command executes after the 'b' is entered, and I only get 'bbbbb'.

I'm sure there's some basic command that can help me here...would somebody be kind enough to enlighten me :)?

Keith Flower · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-27T10:53:12.290

25

One way is via a keyboard macro:

C-x (bla C-x)C-u4C-xe

You can also just insert the repeat count before the macro termination:

C-x (bla C-u5C-x)

edited Jul 27 '13 at 10:53

answered Jul 27 '13 at 05:30

Keith Flower

3

Keyboard macros...awesome! Something tells me I'm going to love Emacs :). – sammy34 Jul 27 '13 at 06:34
6

Just for the record, the official way to use macros is `F3` to start recording and `F4` to finish and `F4` to execute. The `C-x` version is deprecated and could change. – Malabarba Jul 27 '13 at 08:57
1

@Malabarba That's news to me. I can more easily touch type `C-x (`, etc. Some flame war history here: http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/emacs_keybinding.html – remcycles May 04 '18 at 18:51

score 16 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 27 '13 at 06:33

16

You can do it with keyboard macros: f3blaM-5 f4.

Alternate to M-5 f4 is just f4 a bunch of times.

answered Jul 27 '13 at 06:33

abo-abo

2 Answers2