Comment out a portion of a line

[adamm]

The vim-commentary documentation states three keyboard mapping examples to comment out whole lines of code, but I'm curious there is any plan to extending this plugin to support portions of a line.

Such as, for example, "\iw" would comment out only single word, and "{Visual}" comment out only highlighted words.

I can attempt to tackle this feature myself, but I'm no Tim Pope when it comes to Vim plugins :)

[adamm]

Oops, Github escaped by backslashes :) .. Obviously I meant "\iw" and "{Visual}\" respectively.

[tpope]

I have no such plans. How often does this really come up? I'm trying to think of even one instance of wanting this.

[tpope]

Mind you, I'm biased because like 90 percent of my code is in languages that only have linewise comments. But that raises the question of what happens in those languages.

[adamm]

Certainly language requirements dictate comment structure, but also personal coding style can avoid the need for partial line comments. To give you a specific example in C++, I was debugging a remote problem yesterday with the following block:

if (!first_run_ui_bypass && !force_first_run && !headless_setup &&
    (parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kApp) ||
     parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kAppId) ||
     parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kNoFirstRun)))
  first_run_ui_bypass = true;

I needed to bypass out the first two boolean checks, while maintaining the essence if block and bracket syntax. To do so, I was hoping to highlight only part of the first line, press "\", and produce this:

if (/*!first_run_ui_bypass && !force_first_run &&*/ !headless_setup &&
    (parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kApp) ||
     parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kAppId) ||
     parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kNoFirstRun)))
  first_run_ui_bypass = true;

Instead got this:

/* if (!first_run_ui_bypass && !force_first_run && !headless_setup && */
    (parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kApp) ||
     parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kAppId) ||
     parsed_command_line.HasSwitch(switches::kNoFirstRun)))
  first_run_ui_bypass = true;

Naturally I can fix this by hand, but then there's no benefit to using this plugin ;)

[tpope]

Okay, well, I guess I'm not opposed to it, but I'm not very motivated to work on it either. And I'm kind of worried about how much complexity it will introduce.

One thing I am absolutely opposed to is configuration options for separate linewise and inline comments, because this means one of:

• The user has to maintain a bunch of comment configuration options
• The plugin has to maintain a bunch of comment configuration options

Both of those are unacceptable, in my book. Instead, we either have to parse 'comments', or limit support to a single comment syntax per file type.

This is a daunting task, so I feel like I should also inform you of tcomment, a commenting plugin that does pretty much everything.

[Alaya-in-Matrix]

Is there any way to comment a block instead of comment each line in the block? for example, comment like this:

/*
int x = 3;
int y = 4;
*/
return 0;

instead of:

/* int x = 3; */
/* int y = 4; */
return 0;

[unphased]

@Alaya-in-Matrix I think a separate issue is appropriate for a request like that (my comment on it is -- how might user choose which type of comment to apply? global config?)

And +1 for this issue. I often find a need to comment out a specific argument to a function call. It's very natural with argtextobj plugin: vaagc should comment out the arg under cursor.

[edi9999]

Also would be interested in this, but I also understand that it wouldn't be very simple to develop and maintain

[grepsuzette]

sounds like you could do this with vim-surround instead