I noticed that the developer of kitty terminal uses this style of comments I have rarely if ever seen elsewhere:
outside
#: section {{{
inside
#: }}}
Kate text editor recognize sections for purposes of highlighting, folding etc. It’s really nice for me because I sometimes I have a difficult time navigating large text files. And it lets you nest them.
- what is this called?
- are there other ways to do it?
- is it standard among text editors? I believe Kovid the dev for
kittyis avimguy so presumably there is support there also. - why don’t more people use it? are there problems?
Screenshot that shows the code folding.
- Cursor is at the end of line 7 so the whole section line 7-22 is highlighted
- lines 12-16 are folded in a 3rd level comment
- I also included tab indents just to make it easier to see what’s going on (Kate treats it the same way regardless of indents)
- Highlighting/Mode > Scripts > Bash
I also like his style of distinguishing between narrative comments (starting with #:) and commented-out code (starting with #). Although in my example, Kate doesn’t treat them differently. Is there a term for this? Any conventions, support etc?
plain text used for screenshot
#: Comment level 1 {{{
#: Comment level 2 {{{
#: configure something
key value
#: }}}
#: Another Comment level 2 {{{
#: Comment level 3 {{{
#: Helpful explanatory comment
file location
#: }}}
#: Comment level 3 with hidden text {{{
you_cant see_this
hidden_emoji "👁️"
hidden_emoji2 " 👁️"
hidden_emoji3 " 👁️"
#: }}}
#: let's set some things up
# setting yes
# other_setting no
different_setting maybe
#: }}}
# regular comment
#: }}}
# regular comment outside anything
For a real world example, see sample kitty.conf file provided on project website.
I am very rarely working in other people’s stuff because I am too rudimentary but of course I try to follow their rules when I do.
For my own purposes, I would do it in one of the below ways. I made the case more complicated by changing the lengths. I mostly choose consistent levels of indentation using tabs over per-character alignment but not always.
[--]= tab,~= single space (and double space = double space in front of comments for legibility here)function() { [--]var = 1 [--]another_var = 2 [--]indented(arg, arg2, arg3) [--]indentedTwo(arg, [--]~~~~~~~~~~~~arg2, [--]~~~~~~~~~~~~arg3) #: aligned by spaces to match specific charecter length [--]indentedThree( [--]~~~~~~~~~~~~arg, [--]~~~~~~~~~~~~arg2) #: aligned by space to arbitrary charecter length, same as the previous [--]indented4( [--][--]arg, [--][--]arg2) #: aligned by tabstop by level [--][--]~~~~~ #: this would be my preference overall if I had to chose [--][--]~~~~~ #: (which so far I haven't) }Kate has a great feature called “insert smart newline” which I shortcut to
shift+enter. If you are typing for example on the penultimate line above and “insert smart newline” it’ll automatically fill the line with[--][--]~~~~~ #:and put the cursor at the end. This feature really enables a lot of these habits for better or worse.When I write output to terminal I really like being able to use
tabsto modify the length of tabs according to what is the content. Sometimes I wish I could settabsin my editor (like a word processor), it would make things simpler. But then there’s portability issues for non standard features like that so.