Comment Rot

Finds comments that went stale when the code next to them changed.

Rot snapshots each comment alongside the code it's attached to. On the next scan, code changed but the comment didn't gets flagged for review. Comments are tracked by what they document, not by line number, so unrelated edits never cause false positives.

Install

1. Run from Source Code:

• Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/TheRustyPickle/comment-rot
• Run with Cargo cargo run --release

2. Run the Latest Release:

• Download the latest executable from Release.
• Unzip the archive and run the binary.

3. Install from Cargo:

• Install with cargo install comment-rot
• Run with the command rot

Usage

rot init              # take a baseline of the project
rot check             # find comments that need review
rot confirm           # apply verdicts (reads JSON from stdin)
rot status            # list issues flagged but not yet fixed
rot resolve <id>      # dismiss a known issue

Neovim plugin

A Neovim frontend lives in lua/

return {
    "https://github.com/TheRustyPickle/comment-rot/",
    build = "cargo build --release",
    keys = {
        { "<leader>ri", "<cmd>RotInit<cr>", desc = "Rot init" },
        { "<leader>rc", "<cmd>RotCheck<cr>", desc = "Rot check" },
        { "<leader>rs", "<cmd>RotStatus<cr>", desc = "Rot status" },
        { "<leader>rr", "<cmd>RotResolve<cr>", desc = "Rot resolve" },
    },
    opts = {},
}

See lua/README.md for commands, keymaps, and colors.

Known limitations

• Comments nested inside a single expression (mid method-chain .iter() // note) aren't tracked. Only comments sitting between whole statements/items are.
• Item paths are built from each file's own AST, not Rust's real module graph. Two files can't currently be resolved as the same logical module via mod declarations elsewhere.
• Only supports Rust files

Contributing

Found a bug or an edge case? Open an issue. Fixes and improvements are welcome as pull requests.

License

This project is under MIT.