Hide only comments

Question

In hs-mode, is there a way to only hide the comments (C-style, delimited by /* ...*/), and no other blocks of code?

_{(there was nothing obvious in M-x customize-group hideshow)}

Answer 1

You can just set hs-hide-all-non-comment-function to #'ignore. If you want to do that globally put the following in your init file:

  (setq hs-hide-all-non-comment-function #'ignore)

If you want to do that only for certain major modes replace my-major-mode with the major mode of your choice and put the modified line in your init file:

  (add-hook 'mine-major-mode (lambda () (setq-local hs-hide-all-non-comment-function #'ignore)))

Answer 2

This does not directly answer your question, but it might be an alternative to consider.

Library hide-comnt.el is designed to let you hide or ignore comments.

• There are commands to hide, show, and toggle showing comments.

• There is a macro, with-comments-hidden, that you can use to wrap code that you want to ignore text in comments.

• You can set or bind option ignore-comments-flag to nil to inhibit ignoring comments by the macro.

• You can use option hide-whitespace-before-comment-flag to hide also the whitespace preceding a comment (other than empty lines).

• You can use option show-invisible-comments-shows-all to cause all invisible text to reappear when you turn off hiding comments. (By default, only the hidden comments reappear.)

I can't speak to how well hide-comnt.el might play with hs-mode. An untested guess is that it will work just fine. It uses a specific value (hide-comment) for text property invisible, so I don't expect any conflict.