Methods of skipping huge sections of code while debugging

[Helmet]

Like everybody, I use # to make areas of code stop working while debugging. But sometimes I want many, many lines to temporarily stop working, such as conversations between units, so adding and subtracting a zillion #s is time-consuming. As far as I know, there is no ignore tag, where if you put ignore on line 200 and /ignore on line 2000, the computer skips all the code in between.

So, what do you guys do to skip huge sections of code?

Sometimes I change an event to name=turn 99 to keep it from firing.

[gnombat]

adding and subtracting a zillion #s is time-consuming

Some text editors have a way to do that automatically with a single command.

Alternatively, you could use #ifdef (example).

[Helmet]

Wow, #ifdef works great. Thanks.

I didn't know some text editors can easily add and subtract remarks/comments. Thanks for the tip. I use TextWrangler for Mac. I'll see if it has that feature...

It does, but it only places semi-colons, not #. Evidently there is no way to change it to # in the preferences. That would've been cool.

[Celtic_Minstrel]

Wow, #ifdef works great. Thanks.

I didn't know some text editors can easily add and subtract remarks/comments. Thanks for the tip. I use TextWrangler for Mac. I'll see if it has that feature...

It does, but it only places semi-colons, not #. Evidently there is no way to change it to # in the preferences. That would've been cool.

I am 99% sure that you can make this feature work correctly in TextWrangler. The reason it places semicolons is because it has been set to map the *.cfg file extension to the INI file format, in which semicolons are the comment character. What you need to do is change the mappings in preferences (add a custom extension mapping in the Languages section) so that *.cfg instead maps to the WML file format… which also means you need to install a language definition for the WML file format.

You can find an old one that I made right here on the forum. It's out-of-date and won't correctly highlight some tags and stuff, but I believe it should still work for the basic WML syntax, and it's just a .plist file so if you're so inclined you could probably update it yourself.

I had a better one in progress that adds an actual DLL plugin for some richer features. Unfortunately, it's rather buggy in its current state and sometimes just refuses to highlight a file at all until you reopen it, so I haven't released it. I don't use TextWrangler for editing WML lately anyway, so I haven't had much motivation to finish it, but if anyone wants the source code I can send it to them.

[Helmet]

...What you need to do is change the mappings in preferences (add a custom extension mapping in the Languages section) so that *.cfg instead maps to the WML file format… which also means you need to install a language definition for the WML file format...

Thank you, Celtic_Minstrel. It worked!

I have always wanted my text editor to work with WML. Wow. I'm sure this will help me make fewer mistakes. Not only can I make remarks appear and disappear like magic, my tags are now BLUE.