Is there a way to make a macro operate up to a marker? I know if I do 5@a my macro will operate on 5 lines. Example:set marker with `mc`record a macro with `qa`... now what?Obviously 'c@a just moves the cursor to the marker at c. I've tried buffers, b'c, but that just goes to the marker. I'm probably missing something very basic or just looking in the wrong places. 
Vim markers and macros
vim;macro
You might try this::.,'c normal @aThis uses the ranged :normal command to run the normal-mode command @a with the cursor successively positioned on the first column of each line starting with current line and going down to to the line with mark c. If the mark happens to be above the cursor, then Vim will ask if you want to reverse the range.This is not always the same as applying a count to @a (e.g. 5@a) because the content of register a may not always move down a single line each time it is executed (consider a macro that uses searches to move around instead of j or k: it would require a higher count to fully process lines that have multiple matches).