Re: [Help-nano] block comment

[Chris Allegretta]

Hello higuita,

I agree with Benno that this is something nano can't easily do but
should do down the road.  How I tend to do this when I need to is:
- Move to the first line I want to start commenting
- Hit Meta-R, Meta-E (to enable a regex search and replace)
- Enter ^ (to match beginning of the line) and hit enter
- Enter the comment identifier(e.g. // or #) and hit Enter
Say Y for all the lines I want to comment out.
Hit ^c when done

Usually it gets me through what I need.  Hope this helps!


On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 6:15 AM, Benno Schulenberg
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Oct 31, 2015, at 06:04, higuita wrote:
>>       I would like to know if nano can do comment block operations, like
>>       selecting several lines and then "comment out" all those
>>       lines.
>
> Hm.  You can do that by using a regex search-and-replace on
> a selected piece of text.  I know, that is a lot of keystrokes,
> but what you're asking (prefixing lines with some character)
> is quite specific -- indenting on the other hand is used in
> any kind of text.
>
> What nano needs is the ability to define and execute macros,
> so that you can assign the above long string of keystrokes
> to a certain key combo.  Lacking that, it would be nice if
> nano could execute an external program on a selected piece
> of text.  It can already run a spell checker on such a piece
> of text; maybe this can be generalized to be able to run any
> kind of program...
>
> Hmmm.  Maybe you can "abuse" the speller to do what you want.
> Write a little sed script that prefixes a given file with the
> required character, then add 'set speller "prefixit.sh"' to
> your .nanorc, and then ^T should do what you want.
>
> Benno
>
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