Comments on: Every keystroke is a prisoner – a neat commenting trick

By: hdragomir

hdragomir — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:44:45 +0000

Very, very neat trick.

I use Komodo, and the Ctrl + 3 to comment and Ctrl + Shift + 3 to uncomment make my life easier.

By: eostrom

eostrom — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:30:42 +0000

This looks like one of those things that is clever but not wise. It’s convenient while you’re working intensely with that block of code–but when you’re done, you (maybe) have code that looks disabled but isn’t. Not so easy for other developers (or you, later) to follow.

Not a problem if you remember to remove the confusing comments when you’re done, but, well, I never remember stuff like that.

By: sekostar

sekostar — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:20:01 +0000

there is another neat trick. disable first tabTitle.innerHTML = /* [a href="+tab.link+" rel="nofollow">'+tab.title+''; // */ tab.title; disable second tabTitle.innerHTML = [a href="+tab.link+" rel="nofollow">'+tab.title+''; // */ tab.title;

By: SeanO

SeanO — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:49:31 +0000

In PHP, it’s even easier to use the single # character to comment/uncomment blocks of code:
/*
..code
*/

to:

#/*
..code
#*/

By: DarrenDR

DarrenDR — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:17:31 +0000

This was blogged last year at http://51elliot.blogspot.com/2007/09/comment-switches.html

By: Mark Holton

Mark Holton — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:48:03 +0000

…i dig it…

By: starkraving

starkraving — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:35:26 +0000

Yay! Homesite FTW! I have Aptana/Eclipse with CFEclipse and I never use it. ColdFusion Studio is still doing it for me even today. I hate this website btw. I come in in the morning at 9 ready to work and I say to myself ‘I’ll just check the RSS feed of Ajaxian to see if there’s anything interesting’. 45 minutes later I have to physically peel myself away to get started on my work. Absolutely invaluable. Thanks to all who spend the time to keep it current!

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:42:51 +0000

I don’t understand why you would use this technique since any decent text editor or IDE has this ability with a keyboard shortcut, but this is pretty cool if you’re still using Notepad for your development. But then again – if you were using Notepad – you wouldn’t get the syntax highlighting which would make this technique pretty unreadable.

By: sciamop

sciamop — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:55:22 +0000

The extensible key commands (that generated wrapper tags/text around selection) of Homesite was a killer feature — this is one of the main reasons I’ve continued using it 5 years after its final release.

I’ve started using Aptana (Rails + Javascript) and really miss the functionality — I’ve tried to duplicate it with eclipseMonkey but it’s hit or miss.

Another fun tip, is to use undo (ctrl+z) as a mechanism for ‘jumping back’ to previous code block (hit redo/ctrl+y once you are there).

By: evank

evank — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:30:58 +0000

@Mathieu, perl has a distinct advantage; the Smart::Comments module on CPAN. Its not exactly the same, but I find it an invaluable tool during the testing/debugging process

By: Rommeech

Rommeech — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:48:18 +0000

Good idea! Unfortunately doesn’t work with Perl…

By: Mathieu \'p01\' Henri

Mathieu \'p01\' Henri — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:39:29 +0000

Let’s try that one more time and see if Ajaxian borks the comment again, shall we ?

/* // toggles the comment blocks NAY /*/ YAY /**/

By: Mathieu \'p01\' Henri

Mathieu \'p01\' Henri — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:37:41 +0000

In JS, I often use the following 2 comment blocks toggle:

/* //

By: Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:15:26 +0000

@fraggy yes, he updated the post and I was just about to edit this one. Oh well, I still will for those who are not comment subscribed.

By: fraggy

fraggy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:11:13 +0000

Update: Works in CSS, too.

Comment:
.test { border:1px solid red; /*/ background-color: blue; /**/ margin: 1em; }

Uncomment:
.test { border: 1px solid red; /**/ background-color: blue; /**/ margin: 1em; }

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:58:13 +0000

Nice trick. Doesn’t work with TSQL though, but then if you’re using MS IDEs you have the Ctrl+K,Ctrl+C and Ctrl+K,Ctrl+U key chords to comment and uncomment selected text respectively.