Why does Evil store macros differently from `kmacro-to-register`?

[okamsn]

Issue type

• Question

Environment

Emacs version: 28.1 Operating System: Ubuntu 22.04 Evil version: 1.14.0 Evil installation type: MELPA Graphical/Terminal: X Tested in a make emacs session (see CONTRIBUTING.md): No

Reproduction steps

• Start Emacs
• Record Evil Macro into a register
• Run view-register.
• See that Evil kmacro is not displayed correctly.
• Record Emacs macro.
• Run kmacro-to-register.
• Run view-register.
• See that the Emacs kmacro is formatted correctly.
• Run evil-view-registers.
• See that the Evil macro is formatted correctly and that the Emacs macro is not formatted correctly.

Expected behavior

• That Evil kmacros stored in registers would be formatted the same as Emacs kmacros stored in registers in commands like view-register and evil-view-registers.
• That the data types would be the same.

Actual behavior

• Evil seems to store its kmacros as strings or vectors, which Emacs does not recognize as kmacros in view-register.

Further notes

Question:

• What is the benefit of not using the method that Emacs uses to store keyboard macros in registers?

[tomdl89]

I don't know why, but having spent some time in this part of the codebase, I don't get the impression compatibility with Emacs' kmacro functionality was a top priority when this was implemented. A PR is welcome, but writing regression tests for macro functionality is hard (because tests use macros), so I'd expect a fairly thorough list of manual tests I can follow, in their absence.