comment out more than 1 line at once?

[Roy Smith]

Riko Wichmann <riko.wichmann at remove-this.desy.de> wrote:
> I'm using emacs (with python-mode) to do most of my editing. also tried 
> IDLE from python already, which is nice but an old dog doesn't like to 
> learn new tricks :)

Emacs is great for stuff like this.  There's probably other ways to do 
it, but what I would do is a quick keyboard macro.  Go to the beginning 
of the first line and type:

C-X ( # C-A C-N C-X )

That defines a macro which inserts a # then moves to the beginning of 
the next line.  Then you need to execute that once for each additional 
line you want to comment out.  If there's 17 additional lines, you would 
do:

C-U 1 7 C-X E

Hmmm.  I just did help-appropos on "comment" and of course I found the 
better way I suspected must exist :-)  You can just use M-X 
comment-region or M-X py-comment-region.

Still, learning how to do keyboard macros will really improve your 
productivity in emacs.  There's often a better way to do something, but 
for simple repetitive tasks, you can often write and execute a keyboard 
macro faster than you can look up the better way.