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Comment by to3m | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why people have such a blind spot in this regard, but Visual Studio's non-support for word-wrapping comments is obviously shameful. It's utterly ridiculous that you have to press Return while writing comments, and then more ridiculous yet that you have to go back and re-wrap them by hand when they change! - and the end result of course is that people usually don't bother, with the wrapping becoming steadily more ragged over time. Which looks shit.

So, I'll recommend this addin, that fixes it pretty nicely:

http://kynosarges.org/CommentReflower.html

Though, you know... I've recommended this to numerous people over the years. And all of them have gone and ignored me. So perhaps I'm just unusual, and people like the raggedy look. Still, Comment Reflower gets my vote.

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To be honest it's not a problem I have, I like to keep my comments short and punchy. If I'm writing war and peace, it will only ever be for the class comment at the top, for some reason I manually do my own line breaks then as I feel it can be used to break up thought and provide emphasis.

However, I'm also a GhostDoc fan: http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx So I appreciate some people consider me to be inherently evil/lazy.

Even if it's a problem you'd have, you really have a luxury problem if having to press enter when writing comments is the thngs you worry about when delivering code.

Not if you kill yourself after the 9000th time you've had to do it. Death is a real hardship for people of all income levels.

That's very dismissive of a very real problem. When you add friction to comments, people either

a) Don't write them in the first place. b) Don't keep them up to date (as to3m mentioned, it is utterly ridiculous when you need to update a comment and then need to reflow every following sentence. Many developers will simply not do it).

Additionally another counterpoint seems to be "my comments are short anyways", which would make me question why comment in the first place? In most cases where I've seen short comments, they were completely unnecessary redundant restating of exactly what the code already tells you.

The comments that really add real value don't try to pseudo-code the code, but instead tell you the why of the code. It is extremely hard to describe why in 80 characters or less.

Yes, I've found this too. Comments that are useful to more than just the original author tend to be at least 2-3 sentences long. It's hard to fit that many sentences into 80 characters, a total which is already being eaten away by indentation and comment prefix. (For example, your average C# function will be indented 2 stops. C++ member function declarations will be indented 1 or 2 stops. In both these cases you also lose 2 or 3 chars from the leading "//" or "// ".)

Before I used Comment Reflower, I used one of the example VBA macros that comes with Visual Studio. It was rather slow, and somewhat buggy (you're much, much better of with Comment Reflower) but it would - usually - word wrap your comments without making too much of a mess. But I noticed my comments improving in quality pretty much the moment I started using it, because finally I could say as much as needed to be said without it being a bother to keep things nicely formatted, or having to even think about the effort of keeping it up to date later.

Not evil/lazy - after all, what could be less lazy than spending all that time pressing return and reformatting your comments? Just, to my mind, a bit unusual.

Manual word wrapping reminds me of the days before copy and paste and undo, which (due to my age) thankfully didn't last all that long for me. I personally do not want ever to go back to that time, though I suppose for some the idea might seem attractively quaint ;)

I know I use vim and shell out to fmt a lot when writing in TeX. Is there a version of fmt that is comment aware, or some flags to it?

Do the JetBrains IDEs have any fix like this? When I've used them, I have to go back and re-wrap my comments when they change...

I use PHPStorm and encountered a wrap problem where if I had a space somewhere it dropped to a new line.

file > settings > general > (uncheck "wrap when typing reaches margin")

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