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POHow do I bind a regular expression to a key combination in emacs?
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copied!<p>For context, I am something of an emacs newbie. I haven't used it for very long, but have been using it more and more (I like it a lot). Also I'm comfortable with lisp, but not super familiar with elisp.</p> <p>What I need to do is bind a regular expression to a keyboard combination because I use this particular regex so often.</p> <p>What I've been doing: </p> <pre><code>M-C-s ^.*Table\(\(.*\n\)*?GO\) </code></pre> <p>Note, I used newline above, but I've found that for <code>isearch-forward-regexp</code>, you really need to replace the <code>\n</code> in the regular expression with the result of <kbd>C-q Q-j</kbd>. This inserts a literal newline (without ending the command) enabling me to put a newline into the expression and match across lines.</p> <p>How can I bind this to a key combination? </p> <p>I vaguely understand that I need to create an elisp function which executes <code>isearch-forward-regexp</code> with the expression, but I'm fuzzy on the details. I've searched google and found most documentation to be a tad confusing.</p> <p><em>How can I bind a regular expression to a key combination in emacs?</em></p> <hr> <p><strong>Mike Stone had the best answer so far -- not <em>exactly</em> what I was looking for but it worked for what I needed</strong> </p> <p>Edit - this sort of worked, but after storing the macro, when I went back to use it later, I couldn't use it with <kbd>C-x e</kbd>. (i.e., if I reboot emacs and then type <kbd>M-x macro-name</kbd>, and then <kbd>C-x e</kbd>, I get a message in the minibuffer like 'no last kbd macro' or something similar)</p> <hr> <p>@Mike Stone - Thanks for the information. I tried creating a macro like so:</p> <pre><code>C-x( M-C-s ^.*Table\(\(.*C-q C-J\)*?GO\) C-x) </code></pre> <p>This created my macro, but when I executed my macro I didn't get the same highlighting that I ordinarily get when I use <code>isearch-forward-regexp</code>. Instead it just jumped to the end of the next match of the expression. So that doesn't really work for what I need. Any ideas?</p> <p>Edit: It looks like I <em>can</em> use macros to do what I want, I just have to think outside the box of <code>isearch-forward-regexp</code>. I'll try what you suggested.</p>

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