[Alphacocoa-devel] "Macro" for executing sequential search/replace commands?

[Greg D. <gre...@in...>]

It seems that the more I use AlphaCocoa, the more I find interesting and useful features to speed my workflow.  However, I'm a bit embarrassed to note
that there's something I do frequently that I haven't been able to find a shortcut for, and it's likely my lack of experience with the program:

Many times, when editing a program or even an informational text document, I need to re-format and tweak the document in specific ways.  This entails
making several global search/replaces, sequentially, because the state of the file is such that a single replace command (even with regex) can't make
the necessary changes; i.e., the search/replace result is dependent somewhat on the result of the prior search/replace on the global file contents.
The sequence of commands is the same, but they must be executed one after the other rather than as a single command.

Of course, I can enter the details in the search dialog, and then perform another dialog, and...  but since I know the exact sequence which needs to
be performed, I'd like to be able to create a macro set of commands to do this rather than type them all in manually.  Editors like vi can, for
example, execute multiple commands separated by ";" and can even source them from an external script.

I know this could be done via AppleScript, but I was wondering if there's a method entirely self-contained in Alpha to handle it?  I see a 'macro'
feature and am able to record/save a macro, but it doesn't seem to capture sequential search/replace commands with the parameters I entered.

Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way.  Have I overlooked something really obvious?  It wouldn't be the first time. ;-)


-- 
| Greg Dunn                       | And all you touch and all you see |
| gre...@in...               | Is all your life will ever be.    |
| The Sultan of Slack(tm)         |                   Pink Floyd      |
| http://www.indy.net/~gregdunn/  |                                   |