Nicely formatting long //comments in vim

Question

When I am typing a long code comment in VIM, I manually judge when each comment line reaches 80 characters, then manually typically press < enter >< tab >//< space > and continue on. Likewise it is awkward editing comments, adding or removing text.

// The comments I have to use
// look like this

Ideally, I'd like some kind of comment mode, where you type text, and the 80 line character limit and the // symbols are sorted out automatically. Does anything like this exist?

Answer 1

A variant on @Alex's suggestion is to select the lines in visual mode and then press gq. This allows you to avoid the problem of gqip reformatting code as well.

Pressing capital V selects an entire line, then you can just move up or down to highlight all the comments and press gq.

Answer 2

You can turn on formatting options with set formatoptions=tcq (with tcq each representing an option, there are others as well). Use h formatoptions to see what the various flags are.

In this case you probably want to use set fo+=a.

Personally though, I prefer to just type my comments normally, then when I'm done run gqip. gq is the formatting command, ip for in paragraph. Make sure the comment block is not next to code though or it will suck that up when reformatting your comment.