Comment lines in Vim

Often I have to comment out a line of code. The following 2 maps helped me with speeding up my workflow. cl to comment a line and ucl to uncomment a line

:map cl 0i//<Esc>
:map ucl 02x

Explanation

• 0 jumps to the first first character (including whitespaces) of the current line.
• i changes to the insert mode
• //will insert 2 slashes. For other programming languages where you something else for commenting out a line, you need to replace this. As an example I would replace the // with -- for Eiffel.
• <Esc> switches back to normal mode.

The ucl command is even easier.

• 0 jumps to the first character (including whitespaces) of the current line.
• 2x delets 2 characters starting at the cursor position.