Aligning comments in Emacs

I want my per-line code comments to line up nicely, so I’ll often add a bunch of spaces by hand to make things just so. I realized that, being Emacs, there must be an easier way to handle this. Of course there is.

Two minutes of searching revealed a short bit of lisp that does the job nicely:

;; Align comments in marked region
;; Via https://stackoverflow.com/a/20278032
(defun jab/align-comments (beginning end)
  "Align comments within marked region."
  (interactive "*r")
  (let (indent-tabs-mode align-to-tab-stop)
    (align-regexp beginning end (concat "\(\s-*\)"
                                        (regexp-quote comment-start)))))

Here’s an example of what I was working on, with horribly un-aligned comments.

(setq org-roam-capture-templates
  '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
    :target (file+head "%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org"
                       "#+title: ${title}n#+index: n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/EXPORTn#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/org-roam-publish-fancy.setup")
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("P" ;; Key
     "Public (published in /public)" ;; Description
     plain  ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/PublicTemplate.org")  ;; Template
    :target (file "public/${slug}.org") ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("p" ;; Key
     "project"  ;; Description
     plain   ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/ProjectTemplate.org") ;; Template
    :target (file "projects/%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org")    ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)))

Then, here’s that same thing after executing jab/align-comments

(setq org-roam-capture-templates
  '(("d" "default" plain "%?"
    :target (file+head "%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org"
                       "#+title: ${title}n#+index: n#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/EXPORTn#+setupfile: ~/org/_SETUP/org-roam-publish-fancy.setup")
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("P"                                               ;; Key
     "Public (published in /public)"                   ;; Description
     plain                                             ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/PublicTemplate.org")  ;; Template
    :target (file "public/${slug}.org")                ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)
    ("p"                                               ;; Key
     "project"                                         ;; Description
     plain                                             ;; Type
     (file "~/org/roam/templates/ProjectTemplate.org") ;; Template
    :target (file "projects/%<%Y%m%d>-${slug}.org")    ;; Target
    :unnarrowed t)))

Much better. It’s cool because it uses comment-start so it works with any language’s comment syntax. There are probably 17 other ways of doing this that I haven’t discovered, but this works.

Every day is a new day in Emacs.