Converting Octopress To Middleman With Vim Macros

Converting from Octopress to Middleman was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I finally found a blogging platform that integrates seamlessly into my everyday workflow as a Rails developer. One thing I wasn’t looking forward to though was converting all my old Octopress posts into the proper Middleman format. Thank god for Vim macros.

A Vim macro defined by their wiki:

Recording a macro is a great way to perform a one-time task, or to get things done quickly when you don’t want to mess with Vim script or mappings, or if you do not yet know how to do it more elegantly.

Essentially, a macro is just a sequence of vim commands you record and then reapply somewhere else. If you’re familiar with the . vim command, it’s just the period command on steroids.

Front Matter Before And After 🔗

Here is an example of what the original Octopress YAML front matter looked like:

---
layout: post
title: "Gosu Tutorial"
date: 2014-10-11 11:28:50 +0800
comments: true
categories: ruby, gosu, tutorials
---

This is what I needed the front matter to look like for Middleman:

---
title: Gosu Tutorial
date: 2014-10-11 
tags: ruby, gosu, tutorials
---

As you can see they’re very similar. After removing a few lines, getting rid of some quotes, and re-naming categories to tags it should be good to go for Middleman.

Creating The Macro 🔗

To start recording a macro you press q and then any other letter you want to bind that macro to. For this example I’m going to use r for replace.

Here are all the steps of the macro annotated for clarity:

qr   # start recording macro with cursor on line one  
j    # move down a line to 'layout: post'  
dd   # delete that line since I don't need it   
f"   # go to the first double-quotes  
x    # delete the double quote  
f"   # go to the next double quote  
x    # delete it  
2j   # move down to the 'comments: true' line  
dd   # delete it  
j    # move down to 'categories' line  
cw   # change word 'categories'  
tags # type out tags to be used by Middleman  
esc  # exit insert mode  
q    # stop the recording  

Now that we have our macro built we can apply it to any files that need to be converted by typing @r. Two letters to change 5-6 lines of text into the exact format we need. That is strategic laziness at its finest!