I use "recorded on the fly" macros all the time. But other than that, I use vim to avoid using an IDE as much as possible. I keep in the terminal, have all my tools available, don't have to click around or wait for load times, etc. Vim opens instantly and I can navigate to where I need to go instantly.
For instance, just yesterday, I had a test failed that was comparing two (big) classes of objects, and the test suite spits them out as single long lines as a diff.
But looking at long lines are super hard to read, so I can just do something once (ie: take a vertical chunk of text between zero and the next comma, and append it to end of file) then run that macro 70 times, and suddenly that long line I had to scroll through is all divvied up and I can easily spot where the issue is.
All of this is a bit simpler (believe me!) Compared to trying to remember where a certain menu item or action is. I'd probably have to pull up excel if I didn't have vim.
For instance, just yesterday, I had a test failed that was comparing two (big) classes of objects, and the test suite spits them out as single long lines as a diff.
But looking at long lines are super hard to read, so I can just do something once (ie: take a vertical chunk of text between zero and the next comma, and append it to end of file) then run that macro 70 times, and suddenly that long line I had to scroll through is all divvied up and I can easily spot where the issue is.
All of this is a bit simpler (believe me!) Compared to trying to remember where a certain menu item or action is. I'd probably have to pull up excel if I didn't have vim.
But you've heard this all before