How do I quickly comment and uncomment code in Vim with a plugin?

Explanation

The vim-commentary plugin by Tim Pope provides a minimal yet powerful way to toggle comments in any programming language. Instead of manually typing comment characters and managing edge cases, gcc toggles a comment on the current line, and gc works as an operator with any motion or text object.

How it works

• gcc toggles commenting on the current line
• gc{motion} toggles commenting over a motion or text object
• gc in visual mode toggles commenting on the selected lines
• gcgc or gcu uncomments a contiguous block of commented lines

The plugin detects the correct comment style using Vim's 'commentstring' option, so it automatically works with any filetype that has proper syntax settings.

Examples

gcc       " toggle comment on current line
gcap      " toggle comment on the current paragraph
gc5j      " toggle comment on the next 5 lines
gcii      " toggle comment on the current indent level (with vim-indent-object)

Before and after

With the cursor on a JavaScript line, pressing gcc:

const x = 42;

Becomes:

// const x = 42;

Pressing gcc again uncomments the line back to its original form.

Commenting multiple lines

Use gc with a motion to comment a range. For example, gcap on a Python function:

def greet(name):
    msg = f"Hello {name}"
    print(msg)

Becomes:

# def greet(name):
#     msg = f"Hello {name}"
#     print(msg)

Using with counts

You can prefix gcc with a count to comment multiple lines:

3gcc     " toggle comment on the current line and the next 2 lines

Custom comment strings

If a filetype does not have the correct comment style, set it in your vimrc:

autocmd FileType apache setlocal commentstring=#\ %s

Tips

• Vim-commentary respects indentation: it places comment characters at the correct indent level, not at column 0
• Pair with vim-repeat so . repeats the last comment toggle
• For Neovim users, Comment.nvim offers a similar experience with additional features like block comments (gbc) and support for JSX/TSX contexts
• Works beautifully with text objects: gcit comments inside an HTML tag, gci} comments inside curly braces