Block commenting in Ruby

Question

Does Ruby have block comments?

If not, is there an efficient way of inserting # in front of a block of highlighted code in TextMate?

Receptor

In Emacs, you can press Meta-; to comment / uncomment a selected region. – Billowy

Possible duplicate of Multi-Line Comments in Ruby? – Slatternly

Answer 1

You can do

=begin
  [Multi line comment]
=end

=begin and =end must be at the beginning of the line (not indented at all).

Source

Also, in TextMate you can press Command + / to toggle regular comments on a highlighted block of code.

Source

Point

One thing to note is that you must have the "Source" bundle enabled for the CMD + / shortcut to work. I had disabled it at some point in the past during an overzealous bundle purging rage and couldn't figure out why my Mac kept beeping at me whenever I tried using the comment shortcut. – Gape

Could be worth mentioning that Command + / also block comments in Sublime Text too – Disunion

it goes wrong if there is some <% %> open tags in the block of commented code. Maybe there is any other way to do this? – Fete

Even better, they must be the only thing in their line. If you write something after "=begin" you get "syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting keyword_end" – Acierate

Answer 2

Ruby has documentation comments - they look like this:

=begin
...
=end

Not perfect but they get the job done in a pinch.

[Edit] It is important to note that =begin and =end must be at the beginning of their respective lines.

Wandawander

Answer 3

In TextMate, you can alt-drag vertically to select a column of text. This will duplicate the insertion point across all the lines you select, so you can insert or delete multiple #s at once.

UPDATE: Also in TextMate, assuming you have the right language selected, Cmd + / will toggle commenting every line in a selection regardless of language.

Distraint

Yeah. Notepad++ lets you do this by holding alt as well (e.g. alt-shift-up arrow several times); UltraEdit and other editors have "column mode" as well. – Threedecker

Answer 4

In TextMate 2 you can ⌘/ to comment out the current line or selected lines.

Filipino