Commentstring for terraform files not set

Neovim
1

Hi,

I’m new to Neovim and i have been using LazyVim for the past week. I’m having an issue where when i select a text block in neovim for terraform files and press gcc to comment out the whole selected text block, i get an error like this:

(mini.comment) Option ‘commentstring’ is empty.

I was under the impression that treesitter or maybe the terraform-ls server would set this option for terraform files but that does not seem to be the case.

What is the recommended way to solve this for terraform files?

Thanks

2

Two ways to set filetype-specific options:

  1. (Recommended) Create a “ftplugin” file:

~/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/terraform.lua

vim.bo.commentstring = '#%s'
  1. Use a FileType autocommand
autocmd FileType terraform setlocal commentstring=#%s

(or the Lua equivalent. The Vimscript version is much simpler though).

Neither Vim nor Nvim ship with a filetype plugin (“ftplugin”) for Terraform, so this option is not set by default. There is a plugin, which does set the 'commentstring' option. Maybe they would consider upstreaming it to Vim if you asked them to.

3

The vimscript version is much simpler but incase anyone is interested you can do this in pure lua like:

--fix terraform and hcl comment string
vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("FileType", {
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("FixTerraformCommentString", { clear = true }),
  callback = function(ev)
    vim.bo[ev.buf].commentstring = "# %s"
  end,
  pattern = { "terraform", "hcl" },
})
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