Comments

Scimon lets you annotate a list or temporarily disable parts of it with comments. They are stripped before the list is interpreted, so they never affect the result.

Line comments

Use // to comment until the end of the line. It works on its own line or after a statement:

// where the downloaded files are saved
path "downloads/"   // trailing comment

Block comments

Use /* ... */ for a comment that can span multiple lines:

/*
   This list downloads a couple of papers
   and renders them to PDF.
*/
path "downloads/"

A block comment can also appear inline:

path /* output folder */ "downloads/"

Rules

• A // or /* is only treated as a comment when it is at the start of a line or preceded by whitespace. This means URLs are never mistaken for a comment — https://example.com stays intact because the // comes right after the :.
• Comment markers inside quoted strings are kept as-is, so open "https://site/page#section" or an ai prompt like "explain // in C++" work as expected.
• The Markdown body of a readme { } block is preserved verbatim, so //, # and /* */ written there are kept (they are part of your content, not Scimon comments).

Example

path "downloads/"   // comments work next to directives

/*
   The arxiv paper is fetched and renamed,
   while the second URL is skipped for now.
*/
downloads {
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.08877 as "paper.pdf"
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.01513 !ignore
}