How To Comment Several Lines Quickly Using VIM

By Sudheer Satyanarayana

If you have to insert a comment on several lines do you do manually insert the comment character in every line? Stop. Vim is a good editor and has a nice feature to accomplish this quickly. Here are the steps:

  1. Enter visual blocking mode by pressing CTRL V (CTRL key and the lowercase v).
  2. Make your selection using motion keys(jklm, etc.).
  3. Press I(uppercase I) to enter block insert mode.
  4. Press #, the comment character.
  5. Press Esc key. The comment character # will be inserted on each line the visual block selection.

Read more about visual blocking mode using the vim help topic visual-block. At the command line(:), type help visual-block.

Sudheer Satyanarayana

Sudheer Satyanarayana

Veteran DevOps leader who builds real systems and teaches from experience.

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