center-comment.vim

A very small vim plugin (which used to be part of my .vimrc file) used to align comments centrally:

#                              AN EXAMPLE COMMENT                              #
# ------------------- ANOTHER ONE, THIS TIME MORE STYLISH -------------------- #
# ooooooooooooooooooooo WHICHEVER CHAR YOU WANT, REALLY oooooooooooooooooooooo #

• Capitalise text in comment string
• Use any character to highlight the comment (see Usage examples)
• Change the width of your comment char (see Change text width)
• Deal with multi-line comments
• Deal with comments longer than 75 chars
• Multiple character highlight chars

Installation

Install with your favourite vim/neovim package manager.

Usage

Running the following command on a line containing example comment string:

:CenterComment ~

...will produce the following:

# ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ EXAMPLE COMMENT STRING ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ #

If you omit the ~ there will be default blank space between the comment string and the text you want to center. You can use any character in place of the tilde, but it will probably not work well with multiple characters used.

Mapping

You can define a keybinding for a certain version like any other command!

nn <leader>c- :CenterComment -<cr>

Or...

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>c-", ":CenterComment -<cr>")

There is also a useful Lua function to remap all values, so (for example) <leader>ccX (where X is any other character) will call :CenterComment X.

Change text width

Width of the comment is set in the following precedence:

• Setting the g:center_comment_width global variable
  • Lua equivalent is vim.g.center_comment_width = 50
• textwidth
  • Example :se tw=50
• colorcolumn
  • Example :se cc=50
  • Always takes the first colorcolumn value provided (colour column can be a list of values)
• Default (80 chars)

Further customisation

There are a few other variables which can be used to customise the functionality of this plugin. Here are the default values:

Variable	Description	Default
center_comment_uppercase	Whether or not output comment should be uppercase	true
center_comment_disable_mirror_end	Whether or not to append any line with a single comment character with another (mirroring it)	true

Disclaimer

I wrote this a fairly long time ago and had a fascination with the vim short name versions of the language...

fun! example() abort
  if normal
    echom "fun/endfun is somewhat amusing..."
  elsei bizarre
    echon "elsei is pretty unbelievable..."
  el
    echom "just your classic if/elsei/el/en..."
  en
endfun

Although I've made changes to it since then, this hasn't changed... I should probably change it but I've stuck with it for the fun.

License

MIT. Please see the License file in the root of this repo.