I really want this added. Formatting a block comment by hand is really painful, and javadoc comments are formatted. They aren't the same, but they're similar enough that it feels frustrating. I've been known to change a block comment into a javadoc comment, reformat, then undo that. Of course to do that I have to have an identifier declared at the same indentation level as the block comment because javadoc comments do not reformat unless they are actually above an identifier. So I only do this rarely.

Obviously these are not identical to javadoc comment text, mostly noting the absence of HTML directives. But otherwise the same formatting would apply – just take blank lines to mean blank lines, not new "<p>" directives. Just preserve my comment leader and that's fine.

I would think that if this is done, also formatting blocks (or selected sets of) standalone block comments would be easy to include. It's just a different comment leader at some level. Lots of folks use successive lines of "//" comments instead of "/*...*/" comments.

+1 from me as well. I write a lot of code documentation and not having it formatted automatically for me is such a waste of time, especially given that IntelliJ is formatting all the other forms of comments for me already. It seems more like an oversight than it does an actual issue – like just taking the code that formats the javadoc blocks and adding 1 more condition to it to include block comments.

Denis,

Soft line-wrapping is not the same thing as this feature request. Soft line-wrapping is a visual-only enhancement to the editor to display long content in a more easy-to-read manner. What I (and Ken) are requesting here is to have IntelliJ actually apply the Javadoc formatter to:

/* This is a comment */
// This is also a comment

styles of comments correctly. Eclipse has actually does this since the 2.0 release and it's incredibley helpful for folks that do a lot of commenting in their code to have really long comment blocks wrap and fit within the margins.

We actually want line breaks inserted as well as any necessary comment line prefixes inserted to nicely format our in-code documentation.

Denis, I'll drop-ship you guys a case of beer if we can get this into 9.0.4 :)

I'm hoping it's not actually that hard to impl (since the formatter already does the right behavior with /** blah / comments, just not / blah */ or // blah – comments.

I am going to implement that as a part of IDEA 10 release.

Denis, you are our new favorite person ;)

:)

Denis,

From the option name, I couldn't tell if this addressed the original bug which was the Javadoc formatting rules being applied to slash-dot (/*) and slash-slash (//) comments with regards to:

• line wrapping
  
• correct indentation of text characters (by 1 or 2 spaces to align them nicely) in the case of a slash-dot (/*) comment that ends up being wrapped to multiple lines.

I'm not request you change scope or anything drastic (as much as I would love to see this done) I just wanted to manage my expectations for the upcoming release so I'm not suicidal when 9.1 comes out :)

Well, the problem was that formatter sometimes left long lines (lines that exceed right margin) as is (true at least for javadoc comments, single- and multi-line comments and string literals).
Mentioned feature targets all such lines (regardless their semantic like comment, javadoc, string etc). I.e. it makes formatter break long lines, insert necessary symbols as necessary and adjust new lines indentation as well.
You can wait for the next IJ X EAP and try it yourself.

Denis that sounds spot on actually. I'll give it a try as soon as EAP is ready. Thanks!