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12
2009

vim tip: comments

From the “holy crap why didn’t I find this before” category…

When editing in vim, if you find you need to comment out a block of code, try the following:

  1. Jump to the start of the line at the top or bottom of the block
  2. Press Ctrl+v to enter Visual Block mode
  3. Navigate to the end of the block. You’ll notice only the first column is highlighted (for the most part)
  4. Press I to enter Insert mode before the first non-blank character on the line
  5. Type whatever the comment syntax is for your language, eg. “//”
  6. Press Esc to get back to Normal mode.

You can follow similar steps to uncomment the same block,Ctrl+v to highlight the comment characters followed by x or any deletion command to remove the comment.

UPDATE:

I’ve posted a follow up to this tip that details a quicker way to comment in vim by using a simple function. Check it out here.

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