pycomment

Purpose

This is a vi command to comment or uncomment a section of Python code.

Syntax

Syntax: pycomment

Options and arguments

There are no options or arguments to the command itself. However, its use requires you to be proficient in using vi, especially running commands and addressing a specific block of lines in the edit buffer.

Example

Before

Before invoking the command, consider that your edit buffer looks like:

0001 #! /usr/bin/env python
0002
0003 import sys
0004
0005 print 'Before `if`'
0006 if len(sys.argv) > 1:
0007   """
0008     print the arguments
0009   """
0010   # here we go
0011   for num in range(1, len(sys.argv)):
0012     # this is a naive way to print a list
0013     print sys.argv[num]
0014   # # this is a better way to print a list
0015   # print '\n'.join(sys.argv[1:])

Invoking the command

To comment out lines 11-13 and uncomment lines 14-15, you could use two vi commands:

:11,13!pycomment
:14,15!pycomment

After

After the command runs, the comment status of lines 11 through 15 is swapped:

0001 #! /usr/bin/env python
0002
0003 import sys
0004
0005 print 'Before `if`'
0006 if len(sys.argv) > 1:
0007   """
0008     print the arguments
0009   """"
0010   # here we go
0011   # for num in range(1, len(sys.argv)):
0012   # # this is a naive way to print a list
0013   #   print sys.argv[num]
0014   # this is a better way to print a list
0015   print '\n'.join(sys.argv[1:])

Notes

• This was inspired by the Ctrl-/ command in PyCharm. I created this command because I often edit scripts just in vi rather than any IDE.