Answers to: How do you comment out several lines in vi at once?

Answer by Mike Reno

Mike Reno — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 11:44:43 -0400

Remember VI uses sed and awk commands.

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Answer by Anil

Anil — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 16:33:22 -0400

For me with MAC running UBUNTU/Centos VMs only working options are vim, crtl+v, crtl+i,shift+i,#,esc

Answer by olejorgenb

olejorgenb — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:41:19 -0400

Use repeat last substitute maybe. (unless that's vim specific)

:s/^/#/ <return> j3&

will comment out 4 lines

Answer by codebunny

codebunny — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:40:50 -0400

An alternative for plain vi, and if you have a small number of lines to change, is to do this

put your cursor on the first line
make a note of how many lines you want to change (example 4)
:.,.+3s/^/#/

What you are doing here is telling it to do a search and replace on the block marked out by the current line (. - dot) to the current line plus 3 (dot plus 3). If you have four lines to comment out, it will be current line plus 3 = .,.+3. If you have 10 lines it will be current line plus 9 = .,.+9.

When you do a search and replace, before the s you can specify the region that the search and replace is to apply to. One method of specifying the region is to use line numbers, like m,n = from line m to line n. Example 45,55.

There are a number of abbreviations that fit in there. $ = last line in the file. So if you want to apply it to the whole file, you use 1,$ = from line 1 to last line. Another abbreviation is . meaning the current line. Example .,$ meaning from the current line to the last line in the file.

You can also do relative numbers, like $ - 5 meaning up to the fifth last line. Or .+4 meaning current line plus 4. Or .-2 meaning current line minus 2.

Answer by codebunny

codebunny — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:54:28 -0400

For plain standard vi, do this:

Go to the starting line of the block
ma (to mark the start of the block)
Move to the end of the block.
:'a,.s/^/#/

Basically, you go to to the first line of the block and mark it and you may as well use register a. So that's ma.

Then you move to the end of the block and you do a search and replace.

: puts you into ex mode

'a is the start of the search block and it refers to the mark you made earlier

. is the current line

so the whole block is described by 'a,. (dash a comma dot)

then you replace the start of the line with a #, but only for that specified block (s/^/#/)

This is standard vi, so it will work for you.

Answer by Mike 1

Mike 1 — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:42:31 -0400

Quicker, no custom macros needed:

Press shift-V to go into block selection mode
Select the block you want to comment out
Press: shift-i # ESC
Profit

Shift - I will take you to the beginning of the line, then add your # character. Escape, and it's applied to the entire highlighted block.

This may be vim specific.

Answer by SiegeX

SiegeX — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:51:03 -0400

You can use macro recording to do this:

Put cursor on the 'd' in def blarg_func:
Press Esc to go into COMMAND MODE
Type qa to start a recording macro and store it in register 'a'
Press i to go into INSERT MODE
Press # to enter a literal pound symbol
Press j or the down arrow to go to the next line
Press q to stop recording
Press <#>@a to repeat the macro stored in register a. Example 10@a to comment out the next 10 lines.

So all together the key presses would be: qai#<ESC>jq10@a

Answer by Jason

Jason — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:50:00 -0400

map something to it:

:map ^K I#^[jI#^[

that works for me on AIX, so should work in any vi.

To get the esc working, use control-v, so the key sequence is:

colon map control-k space shift-i shift-3 control-v esc j shift-i shift-3 control-v esc

HTH.

Answer by srinivasmiriyalu

srinivasmiriyalu — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:34:10 -0400

why dont you use Emacs..its very simple in emacs which you have asked

Answer by peter

peter — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:20:11 -0400

Try the Enhanced Commentify plugin. Alternatively you can add some code to your vimrc for each filetype - see here.