My problem was that I couldn't get SlickEdit to record searches during macro recording in Vim emulation mode.
It turns out that if you have the title_change.e macro from the SlickEdit website, when _set_focus is called, somehow the fact that title_change is a _command instead of a normal function causes macro recording to get turned off.
The fix is simple enough:
change the signature of title_change to
_str _title_change(_str new_title=' ')
and update all calls to title_change to use that instead.
You can also add a wrapper function to allow you to manually change the title still:
_command _str title_change(_str new_title=' ') name_info(',')
{
return _title_change( new_title );
}