How to Vim: Toggle Comments

One if the things that had initially frustrated me about Vim is that out-of-the-box there’s no way to toggle comments on and off in programming languages. This definitely struck me as something odd, given that almost all of Vim’s users are programmers and we have to deal with comments quite often.

I quickly discovered a couple of things on the subject:

• Historically the way to address this shortcoming was to install the vim-commentary plugin, which introduces a gc operator that does pretty much what you’d expect.
• Neovim 0.10 (released in 2024) introduced built-in commenting gc operator (likely modeled after the vim-commentary plugin).

As I’m mostly trying to use plain old Vim these days, I’ve been using vim-commentary myself and it definitely gets the job done. Recently, however, I realized I didn’t actually need it as Vim 9.1 finally added a built-in plugin that handles comments toggling.¹ There’s a small caveat, though - it’s not enabled by default. To make use of it you can either:

• Run :packadd comment (useful to try it out and get a feel for it)
• Add packadd comment to your .vimrc (which I think is the way to go)

Now you’ll have pretty much the same gc operator as the one provided by Neovim and vim-commentary. I’m still a bit puzzled, as why this was made something optional, but Vim is a weird editor and I guess that’s aligned with its culture of having very conservative defaults.

One other thing that puzzled me is that this didn’t get any coverage in Vim 9.1’s release notes.² On the bright side - the plugin is documented pretty well. (see :h comment.txt for more details)

Before we wrap up:

• You can also trigger the plugin commands via :Comment and :Uncomment
• I find the most useful commenting commands to be gcc and combining gc with visual mode selection. Neovim has richer text objects, so there it’s also easy to operate on methods, classes, etc.
• Don’t forget to remove whatever comments plugin you’re current using if you decide to switch to the built-in functionality

That’s all I have for you today. Time to get wild with gc!

1. The plugin is named comment. Yeah, yeah - naming is hard! ↩

2. https://www.vim.org/vim-9.1-released.php ↩