Commenting out XML in vim

Question

I often find myself removing and adding XML sections in configuration files:

• tomcat's server.xml
• maven's settings.xml

and many others.

Is there a vim plugin/command to make this simple?

Answer 1

You can use a combination of matching XML tags, as can be seen in this question and Perl's search and replace.

For instance, given this snippet:

<TypeDef name="a">
  <ArrayType high="14" low="0">
    <UndefType type="node">
    </UndefType>
  </ArrayType>
</TypeDef>

Put the cursor on either the opening or closing TypeDef and type the following sequence:

vat:s/^\(.*\)$/<!--\1-->/

v - puts you into visual mode
at - selects the whole XML tag
:s/^\(.*\)$/<!--\1-->/ - surrounds each line with '<!--...-->', the comment delimiters for XML

Alternatively, you can just delete it like this:

dat

d - delete according to the following movements
at - as before

Answer 2

use surround.vim for general tag matching, deleting, inserting, surrounding etc,

For commenting tags, it is easy to use vim text objects & and a simple macro

Example:

enter

vmap ,c <esc>a--><esc>'<i<!--<esc>'>$

somewhere suitable, then place your cursor at the capital "A" of "ArrayType" on line two of the following (borrowed from Nathan Fellmans example above)

<TypeDef name="a">
  <ArrayType high="14" low="0">
    <UndefType type="node">
    </UndefType>
  </ArrayType>
</TypeDef>

then hit

vat,c

and you will get:

<TypeDef name="a">
  <!--<ArrayType high="14" low="0">
    <UndefType type="node">
    </UndefType>
  </ArrayType>-->
</TypeDef>

with your cursor at the end of the comment

Answer 3

I love the simplicity of https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary. Easy to add other languages, though seems to support most out of the box. Under 100 lines of code.

gcc to comment the current line, or select the text you want to comment and hit gc. Super easy.

Answer 4

Vim doesn't have smart commenting for all file types by itself. You should get a script for your commenting needs.

I use the enhcomentify script which has been around and maintained for a long time

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=23

It seems to do xml well and you get the advantage of the same key bindings for any filetype you are using.

There are others.. notably the NERD Commenter

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keywords=comment&script_type=&order_by=rating&direction=descending&search=search