This page shows you how to write a command to comment/uncomment a region of text in a major mode.
There are 2 ways to write a command to comment/uncomment code:
This page will discuss using the
Emacs has a standard command to insert or delete comment, named
When there is a text selection,
comment-dwim will comment or uncomment the region in a smart way.
If there is no text selection,
comment-dwim will insert a comment syntax at the end of line.
comment-dwim is the standard command to comment/uncomment code. Your major mode should support it. When a user types the keyboard shortcut for comment-dwim while in your language mode, he should expect it to work for that language.
uncomment-region are lower level commands that do the actual work.
comment-dwim simply determine whether to comment or uncomment, and on what region boundary, then call
All you have to do, is to set 2 buffer-local variables.
For example, here's code for emacs lisp:
(setq-local comment-start "; ") (setq-local comment-end "")
Here's another example.
In CSS, comment has this syntax:
/* css comment syntax */
Here's full code from emacs's bundled css-mode:
(define-derived-mode css-mode fundamental-mode "CSS" "Major mode to edit Cascading Style Sheets." (setq-local font-lock-defaults css-font-lock-defaults) (setq-local comment-start "/*") (setq-local comment-start-skip "/\\*+[ \t]*") (setq-local comment-end "*/") (setq-local comment-end-skip "[ \t]*\\*+/") (setq-local parse-sexp-ignore-comments t) (setq-local indent-line-function 'css-indent-line) (setq-local fill-paragraph-function 'css-fill-paragraph) (setq-local add-log-current-defun-function #'css-current-defun-name) (smie-setup css-smie-grammar #'css-smie-rules :forward-token #'css-smie--forward-token :backward-token #'css-smie--backward-token) (setq-local electric-indent-chars (append css-electric-keys electric-indent-chars)))
〔➤see Emacs Lisp: Regex Tutorial〕
If your language's comment syntax is more complex, different from any of the form in C, Java, python, ruby, php, etc. You'll need to write your own comment/uncomment command.
thanks to Daniel for correction.