A VS Code extension that toggles comments correctly for CL/CLLE, RPG/RPGLE
(fixed and free format), and SQL source, all with one shortcut: Ctrl+/
(Cmd+/ on Mac).
What it does
File type
Extensions
Comment style
CL / CLLE
.cl, .clle
Wraps the selection in /* ... */. If the selection touches a multi-line statement joined by trailing +/- continuation characters, the whole statement is expanded to and wrapped as one block, not commented line-by-line.
RPG / RPGLE
.rpg, .rpgle, .sqlrpgle
Detects fixed vs. free format per line: whole file is free-form if it starts with **FREE; otherwise /free ... /end-free blocks switch mode within an otherwise fixed-format member. Fixed-format lines get * inserted in column 7; free-form lines get // prepended.
SQL
.sql
Standard -- line comment toggle.
The command is a single toggle: running it on already-commented lines
removes the comment; running it on plain code adds it — same behavior as
VS Code's built-in Ctrl+/, just language-aware for these IBM i types.
Any other file type falls back to VS Code's default editor.action.commentLine.
Try it
Open this folder in VS Code.
Run npm install.
Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host.
Open a .cl, .rpgle, or .sql file, select some lines, press Ctrl+/.
This produces a .vsix you can install via Extensions → ... → Install from VSIX.
A pre-built icomment-0.0.2.vsix is provided alongside this source for
quick testing, built with the official vsce package command.
What happens if a line is too short to comment?
It never fails — short lines are padded with spaces automatically:
RPG fixed-format: if a line is shorter than column 7, it's padded with
spaces up to column 6 before * is inserted at column 7 (a blank line
becomes *). Uncommenting replaces column 7 with a single space and
never shifts any other column.
CL and SQL: comment markers are just inserted/appended as text, so
there's no fixed column to run out of space on.
Known limitations (worth knowing before relying on this)
CL continuation detection is line-ending based. A line is treated as
continued if its last non-whitespace character is + or -. This does
not account for a +/- that appears as the last character inside a
quoted string (rare, but possible) — such a line would be incorrectly
treated as continuing.
RPG fixed-format uncomment doesn't restore an overwritten conditioning
indicator. Commenting a fixed-format line writes * into column 7.
Uncommenting clears column 7 back to a blank. If that column originally
held something other than a blank (unusual, but possible on older specs),
that original value is not preserved.
Column-7 detection assumes 1 tab = 1 character (i.e., no literal tabs in
the source, which is standard for IBM i fixed-format members).
Selections that end at column 0 of a later line (a common artifact of
dragging a full-line selection) are treated as not including that final
line, matching VS Code's normal line-comment behavior.
Extending
To treat other extensions as CL/RPG/SQL, edit the classify() function in
src/extension.ts.
To change the RPG fixed-format comment column, change the 6 / 7
constants in toggleRpgFixedLine().
