A much more elegant solution is to use Commentary[1] in Vim (and I'm sure there's an emacs equivalent too). Just use visual mode to select your text, hit `gc`,

A much more elegant solution is to use Commentary[1] in Vim (and I'm sure there's an emacs equivalent too). Just use visual mode to select your text, hit `gc`, and voilà. 1. https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary