Vim macro not working because of the shortcuts overlapping with Quick Fix command

Question

So, I was trying to write a Vim macro and the macro @p I registered below includes a cc shortcuts which deletes a line. The macro is as follows.

" macro @p
qp
cc{<ESC>j@eA,<ESC>j@ejcc},<ESC>
q 

When I run the macro @p itself, it works just fine.

" macro @q
qq
@pj
q 

However, when I registered another macro @q that uses macro @p, and try to repeat macro @q until the end of file by using :999@q, it says

E42: No errors: cc 

and I have no idea why this isn't working.

I realize this has to do with Quick fix command, and found that there is :cc command in quickfix.txt. I doubt that my problem derives from here.(Because the shortcut for deleting line in Vim is the same as the shortcut for quick fix as cc.

Is Quick fix the reason why I get the E42: No errors: cc? How can I fix the problem? Just so you know, I am using MAC OS and neovim.

Answer 1

When you do:

:999@q

the macro @q is expanded, so you are actually doing:

:999@pj

in which the macro @p is also expanded, so you are actually doing:

:999cc{<ESC>j@eA,<ESC>j@ejcc},<ESC>j

(and then there is the macro @e that is missing from your question, so you eventually end up doing something else we can't really know).

At this point it should be obvious that the normal mode cc from @p is executed as command-line mode :999cc, which throws an error because you don't have a quickfix list with at least 999 entries.

The problem is thus that you are executing a normal mode macro in command-line mode. Doing 999@q in normal mode (note the missing :) should fix your problem.