template comments

[linuxcaffe]

Is there some way that a template file could have comments, that were there for development or explanation of the template, but that was never translated to the generated file.

either a vim-style comment (which might not work great for vim-files where the commented part is desirable)

" a vim-style in-line comment

or something hopefully unique to vim-template, like

%%% this is a vim-template comment

or maybe a block-comment style, like this;

%COMMENT_START%
These are template comments,
and won't be included in the transformation
%COMMENT_END%

[linuxcaffe]

for consistency, perhaps, if a line starts with;

%COMMENT% <-- a vim-template comment, this line will be ignored

and for block-comments;

%COMMENT_START% anything on this line will be ignored
These are template comments,
and these four lines won't be included in the transformation
%COMMENT_END% this line is ignored, too

[muff1nman]

Hmm. What is the use case of this? Do you have templates that are so complex that they need documentation? I would hope that the template files are readable as is.

[linuxcaffe]

Here's one: a template specific modeline.
I'm editing templated for vimwiki, they have vimwiki formatting the with the *.wiki extension, the behaviors and mapping are not helpful, in editing the related templates, so

# vim: foldlevel=3
%COMMENT_START%
# vim: filetype=txt
%COMMENT_END%

(caveat: I don't know how to use modelines very well ;-)
The bottom modeline would (should) apply when editing the template, but would not apply to the transformed file.

[linuxcaffe]

Another use-case might be this:

%COMMENT_START$-------------------------------
| This is a vim-template template            |
| http://github.com/aperezdc/vim-template    |
| ----                                       |
| Licensed under the BlaBlaBlaPublic License |
| http://licenses.com/BBBP/                  |
| ---                                        |
| Author: Edgar Allen Poe                    |
| ---                                        |
| This template designed for: vimwiki diary  |
|                                            |
| and requires:                              |
|                                            |
%COMMENT_END%---------------------------------

[aperezdc]

Probably matching comment start/end pairs would end up in some complex code. Personally I would prefer to only support single-line comments. I am not so sure about what would be the best character for commenting. From the less usual line-comment characters, probably % is the less used — I can only think about TeX. We could match a double (or triple?) percent character exactly at line start, to reduce the chance of clashing with other kinds of comments or valid syntax in some language:

%%% This would be a template comment.
% This would NOT be a comment. It could be a TeX comment, though.
   %%% This is NOT a comment either

This would also have the nice property that matches lines can be completely deleted, and there is no need to preserve the content present before %%% — because there's never content if the match is at the start of the lines.