How to create custom keyboard shortcuts in vim?

Question

For example - when coding in Perl, I need to sometimes comment out a bunch of lines.

• What I do is something like

  :80,96 s/^\(.*\)$/#\1/
  

• I want to create a custom shortcut for this so that I can do something like

  :80,96 cm
  

  for commenting and

  :80,96 uc
  

  for uncommenting.

What should I put in my ~/.vimrc?

Answer 1

You could define a pair commands, like this:

command -range Cm <line1>,<line2>s/^/#/
command -range Uc <line1>,<line2>s/^#//

Note that a user-defined command must start with an upper-case letter. See

:help :command
:help user-commands

There is also a Vim plugin that many people use for this, Enhanced Commentify, but I don't have any experience with it myself.