Is there a way to delete all comment lines in Sublime Text 3?

Question

I know in Vim you can delete all comments in a file with a keyboard shortcut, but I have been unsuccessful finding a similar technique in ST3. This would be particularly useful for gemfiles and other files that have distracting comments everywhere.

Looking for a keyboard shortcut or a quick and easy alternative.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The simplest is to use a regex search-and-replace, e.g.,

• Cmd-Opt-f
• Select the .* option (regex)
• Find What: ^#.*\n ^{Note 1}
• Replace With: (nothing)

This won't work for comment blocks. For them you need to be a bit trickier, (very) roughly:

=begin(.|\n)*=end

^{(Not tested robustly.)}

If you do this a lot (which IMO is a little strange) you could bind it to a key.

---

^{Note 1: This works for comments at the beginning of lines. It doesn't do comments appended to code lines; if you want to handle that then you can remove the ^ but you'll need to so something about the EOLs that would disappear during replacement. Or you can just ignore the EOL and have some blank lines where line comments were.}

Answer 2

What Dave answered didn't work for me. So do the following if its the same case for you too,

To delete all specific <tag> element including contents inside it:

• Ctrl + H (on PC)
• Enable (Regular Expression): .* icon or Alt + R

• Find What:

  RE syntax to work with a particular tag,

  (?s)<start tag>.*?<end tag>

  Such as, for CSS comment tags,

  (?s)/*.*?*/

  For HTML comment tags,

  (?s)<!--.*?-->

• Replace With: Leave the field blank

• Replace All