commenting out blocks of code

[Duncan Booth]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

>> Scite, for example, lets me selected a block and hit Ctrl-Q to either 
>> comment or uncomment the block.
> 
> I see the developers of Scite are either newbies to GUI programming, or
> they operate in a world of their own. Ctrl-Q is reserved for Quit (or
> Exit) in every GUI API I know of.

Your experience obviously differs from mine. I just tried Ctrl-Q on both 
windows and ubuntu and in neither case did it exit applications 
consistently: For example Firefox uses Alt-F4 in both cases.

My own favourite editor (Epsilon) uses Ctrl-Q for the 'quoted-insert' 
command (hardly suprising given its similarity to emacs).

>> (It does this by prefixing each line 
>> with #~ instead of just #, which allows it to detect when a line is 
>> already so commented and reverse the operation.)  
> 
> It is *easy* to detect when a line is already commented. It starts with a
> #. The ~ is superfluous.
> 
Not so easy if the lines to be commented already contain some lines 
starting with comments. Messing around with the comments themselves sounds 
highly unsatisfactory though.

I agree with you that the best solution is to use different commands (or as 
Epsilon does a single command which can be modified with a prefix Ctrl-U). 
That way I can select a large region and comment it all out, or uncomment 
disjoint parts of it as I choose.