[TxMt] folding perl pod?

[Gerd Knops]

On Jul 7, 2006, at 10:23 PM, Allan Odgaard wrote:

> On 8/7/2006, at 0:04, Michael Reece wrote:
>
>> some sections begin with =head1, some with =head2, some have both  
>> =head1 and =head2; but all end with =cut.
>>
>> so there is no way to come up with folding patterns that will  
>> intelligently fold POD sections?  can't have everything, i guess.
>
> No -- for what you want you need to look at lines both above and  
> below the current line to decide if the line is a folding marker.  
> If TM did that, it would mean that editing a single line would in  
> worst-case have to look at every other line in the document. That  
> doesn’t scale.
>
I would love to see folding reworked. Not sure how others use  
folding, but I almost never use it to just fold a block, I only use  
it for entire methods/functions/subroutines/whatever. Preferably I  
would code to open with just top level comments and method/function/ 
subroutine/whatever definitions visible, no extra lines. That speeds  
up code navigation tremendously.

Currently folding can't do that:

- It forces me to put the opening brace on the same line as the  
method definition, or I end up with a line containing just the  
opening brace and the fold marker

- It can not gobble up trailing empty lines

- It can't deal with situations like the one described above.

I would love to see a more powerful folding implementation, even if  
it means folding is only calculated during open/save of files. As is,  
I don't use folding much and really miss it.

> I don’t know how much freedom you have with the POD markers, but  
> you could introduce a convention, e.g. trailing space after =head2  
> makes it not a fold marker. That would then allow you to manually  
> exclude the problematic folding markers.
>
There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of perl files containing  
POD documentation, so this is impractical. Never mind that making an  
invisible trailing space do something is just a bad idea in the first  
place.

Gerd