Text editing - insert comments (#) in Ubuntu with gedit or other text editor

Question

I am programming in a dedicated language called macro language.

To comment I need to add # at the beginning of the line.

What I want is, in order to spare time, to comment several lines of code at same time with gedit or other program (gedit is nice in terms of the colors, which make the code more readable).

How can I do it?

Thank you in advance.

Shed

Actually, is this asking how to comment code generally, or how to specify the line-comment-start string for a specific gtksourceview language definition? – Fasano

I need to add a character # to the beginning to each line I want to comment. So what I want is select the code and then at the same time a # to the beginning of each line I selected :) – Lucinalucinda

Answer 1

Possibly need # apt-get install gedit-plugins.

Then go to edit > preferences > plugins > enable "code comment".

Then use ctrl-m to comment and ctrl-shift-m to uncomment.

(Technically, I think this would go in SuperUser though.)

Fasano

for me doesn't because the comment character is a # and with that plugin is a %... is there a way to turn around this? – Lucinalucinda

@AndréMiguelMonteiro, see my other answer for how to specify a correct line-comment-start for gtksourceview (gedits source code parsing engine). – Fasano

Answer 2

There is a plugin for gedit, which should help for your needs. You can get this from github:

https://github.com/jessevdk/gedit-multi-edit

Working

That is... really overkill for commenting out code blocks. – Fasano

Yes you are right i was just thinking about multiple editing points, but just for the comment stuff ur way is much easier to do ;) – Working

how do I install the plugin? – Lucinalucinda

I am not getting it right it is really overkill like David said! But thank you sLy – Lucinalucinda

Answer 3

You can specify a custom language definition by putting the below text (with ... replaced with the rest of the language definition) in ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/thingy.lang:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<language id="thingy" _name="Thingy Code" version="2.0" _section="Sources">
  <metadata>
    <property name="line-comment-start"># </property>
    ...
  </metadata>
  <styles>
    ...
  </styles>
  <definitions>
    ...
  </definitions>
</language>

You'll probably want to base your language spec off of one of the langage specs in /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/, since it's kind of a pain to get a working language spec from scratch (especially since the XML parser error messages are anywhere from useless to worse).

Fasano

I can't find the folder gtksourceview – Lucinalucinda

@AndréMiguelMonteiro, if you mean ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-3.0/, you might have to create it (and language-specs/), since I don't think they get created by default. If you mean /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/, then your system is probably completely different from what I can usefully give advice on. – Fasano