Keyboard shortcut to "Comment" a line in NANO?

text syntax editor comments command-line-interface
Alex Gray picture Alex Gray · Aug 24, 2011 · Viewed 22.3k times · Source

I love NANO. It's always there, it can slice and dice, and its NOT VIM!

But I am constantly hitting Command / - inadvertently - as I go along, out of habit.. Most IDE's use this convention to "comment out" a line. NANO has great syntax highlighting.. so it knows the context of my documents.. but I haven't been able to figure out a way to get it to perform this basic, yet relatively important function.. Hand-commenting is for the birds.

I suppose this is sorta a super-user question, but in my experience, this would get a bunch of blank stares and then a few people asking who Nano was, so... here it is...

Oh and PS, brownie points for anyone that knows how to get DashCode to be able to do this as well... It would be the finest Javascript IDE EVER if it could perform this trick... and I'm convinced Apple omitted the feature for just that reason, lol.

Answer

Roland Bischof picture Roland Bischof · Oct 20, 2015

The simplest workaround I've found:

  • Comment-out:
    set the cursor at the first row that should be commented-out
    hit twice 'M-R' (or 'Alt-r'; in order to Replace a RegExp)
    Search for: '^'
    Replace with: '# '
    Replace this instance?: 'y'
    press 'y' for each row to be commented-out

  • Comment-in:
    The same procedure, replacing '# ' by ''

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