How to comment out a snippet

[austinliuigi]

I am creating a snippet to quickly create vim modelines, and I'm attempting to comment it out dynamically no matter what language I am expanding it in.

I am leveraging the Comment.nvim api in the snippet's callback, but ran into some issues.

local snippets = {
  s("modeline", fmt([[
    vim: set {} :
  ]], {
    i(0, "opt=value opt=value")
  }), {
    callbacks = {
      [0] = {
        [events.enter] = function()
          require("Comment.api").toggle.linewise.current()
        end
      }
    },
  }),
}

With this implementation, the only issue is that the text that is selected for the insert node is in its original position before the comment characters were inserted:

Any tips on how to fix this?

[L3MON4D3]

Hmmm, the problem is that we select the text before firing the event...

One solution to this issue is of course to fire the event before selecting (eg. executing the "enter"), but I'm not sure we disable some other workflow with that.
Maybe we should introduce events.enter_pre, events.enter_post, and make enter an alias for enter_post (to not break current behaviour)

Until then, I think you could get away with re-using the code we use to select the insertNode (select again after toggling the comment) though I won't promise that this'll work indefinitely :P

[austinliuigi]

Sounds good, adding those extra events sounds like a good idea to give users more flexibility :)

[leiserfg]

You can use the LINE_COMMENT or the BLOCK_COMMENT_START BLOCK_COMMENT_END environment variables.

[L3MON4D3]

(should've reloaded before commenting xD)
Ahh, I was confused for a second because help shows /*%s*/ as just a bold /%s/. Yeah, that's a good argument, but we can easily add a namespace for comment.nvims comments.

Not sure though, should it live in luasnip or comment.nvim?

[leiserfg]

Not sure though, should it live in luasnip or comment.nvim?

A bit skeptical about integrating with 3rd parties, imagine tomorrow a better commenting plugin comes, will we force users to keep using the old one? I used to contribute/use Komentary but switched to comment.nvim in a blink and that could happen again.

[L3MON4D3]

Good point.. unfortunately the same argument applies to snippet engines, from a commenting-plugin-maintainer's perspective xD
The main downsides of hosting that stuff here seems to be that interface-changes can lead to broken code on our side, but there's no way around that if we want to support these integrations.

I think supporting multiple commenting-plugins shouldn't be problematic, given they all have some kind of get_line_comment, get_block_comment api.

[leiserfg]

Then we have to decide if we wanna do it as I said (check the snippet plugin the user is using and fallback to our own implementation) or have it in a different env-variable.
As far as I know the most used ones are tpope/vim-commentary (uses commentstring as we do so does not need a custom implementation)
comment.nvim and Kommentary.
The other problem I can foresee is that some users configure their comment plugin to load on a keypress (using the keys arg of packer), that could make that the environment variable takes different values depending on the load of the plugin.

[L3MON4D3]

Oh, yeah different env-variable for sure, I was thinking of providing it via environ_namespace.

The other problem I can foresee is that some users configure their comment plugin to load on a keypress (using the keys arg of packer), that could make that the environment variable takes different values depending on the load of the plugin.

Mhm yeah, that would indeed be a problem.. Not sure how to best approach this then :/