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Auto-comments are the most annoying "feature" of text editors and IDEs for me.

I've searched -- nay, scavenged -- high and low to figure out how to get rid of literally any semblance of automatic comment continuation, and for whatever reason it's proving impossible and incredibly annoying.

Right now, I have tried the following three lines, which works for most languages.

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead,FileType * set formatoptions-=cro
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead,FileType * setlocal formatoptions-=cro
au FileType c,cpp setlocal comments-=:// comments+=f://

But whenever I open a file that isn't considered C++ at first (i.e. not the correct extension) and use setf cpp, all auto-comments seem to come back to haunt me.

Even sometimes opening a known-to-be-C++ file, this still happens. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it's aggravating.

How on Earth can I tell vim that I really truly do not want auto-comments, ever, under any circumstances? I feel like I've been plagued by this for years.

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    Just to eliminate the obvious first: we are sure that you don't have a plugin which re-enables your autocomments? If you start vim with a vimrc containing only the 3 lines in your questions you still observe the same problem?
    – statox
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 7:53
  • @statox Yeah, I tried that already. This has definitely been a problem since before I knew plugins were even a thing (years ago). Always good to check, though.
    – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 10:07
  • The answer is simple: do not enable filetype plugins.
    – Christian Brabandt
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 11:39
  • @ChristianBrabandt doesn't that disable coloring as well?
    – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 12:29
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    No, however in C and C++ cases it'll break matchpair, plugins that rely on 'commentstrings' to (un)comment blocks of code, and it'll completely disable plugins that define what they provide in ftplugins. For instance, in lh-cpp I define the doxygenating command :DOX in an ftplugin. I understand that some default settings don't suit us, however without ftplugins, vim would be quite crippled for programming tasks. They were the huge improvement of Vim 6.
    – Luc Hermitte
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 18:17

1 Answer 1

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The culprit is $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/c.vim, and likely all other standard ft plugins. If you want everything they define but the setting for 'formatoptions', I don't see any simple solution. (Just in case, $VIMRUNTIME is set within vim)

May be, you could listen for OptionSet to prevent inserting cro in &fo. But beware of possible infinite loops. I've never tried it.

BTW, I would have left 'comments' alone. This option could be used by plugins that toggle comments on blocks, or that generate documentation -- I actually use it in mu-template to insert license captions as comments, which ever the current language is.

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    You are an absolute god. autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead,FileType,OptionSet * set formatoptions-=cro and autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead,FileType,OptionSet * setlocal formatoptions-=cro did it. The struggle is finally over. I feel like I can develop again. The bonds of magic text editors have been freed and my fingers feel liberty once again.
    – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 10:05
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    Any chance you could elaborate? I had a quick look in my copy (Vim 7.4) of c.vim and can't see anything that's not easily overridden (and I haven't ever had any problems with setting formatoptions myself, so I don't really understand what's going wrong.) Why is listening for OptionSet necessary in this case?
    – Rich
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 10:18
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    @Rich. It's about not overriding every possible standard ftplugins. Yes this is indeed possible, but this requires a lot of work. In a normal scenario, we code in 2-3 programming language and we can then override 2-3 ftplugins, copy everything we like (and the b:did_filetype guard), but the formatoption, or even better, let the standard ftplugin do its job, and then cancel in $HOME/.vim/after/ftplugin/ft1.vim the setting on &fo. We can also in two lines override one standard setting for all filetypes if we really don't like it.
    – Luc Hermitte
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 12:16
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    @Qix, I've cheated. Yesterday I was looking for a ShellCmdPre event (which doesn't exist). In the process, I've re^42-discovered OptionSet.
    – Luc Hermitte
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 12:18
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    OptionSet has been included in a Vim 7.4 patch. It might not be available in all versions.
    – Christian Brabandt
    Commented Jan 25, 2017 at 17:34

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