Support folding long block of code by indentation?

[yxiong]

The plugin currently folds imports, docstrings and class/function definitions, but not indentation block. This works great for me in most of situations. In some cases when I deal with very long code block, I wanted to be able to fold them by indentation level. Is there a way to support that as an optional feature, or use a separate tool that integrates with this plugin?

[tmhedberg]

By "indentation block", do you mean the bodies of loops and conditional statements? There is no option for that currently, and I originally left it out on purpose (just because I didn't want it, personally).

I'm not strongly opposed to the idea, but Vim has built-in support for folding based on indentation level, without any plugin (:set foldmethod=indent), so I don't see much need to build custom support for this.

Does the built-in indentation-based folding work well enough for your case?

[yxiong]

Yes, by "indentation block" I meant bodies of loops and conditional statements. :set foldmethod=indent works for those indentation blocks, but when I do that, I lost folding for imports and docstrings. Is there a way to use foldmethod=indent together with SimpylFold plugin, so that I can take the good part of both world?

[tmhedberg]

Unfortunately, there's not an easy way that I know of to combine multiple fold methods.

There are some partial workarounds you could try, like this tip for using indentation-based folding along with manual folding, but this has some significant drawbacks which you might not be happy with. You have to define the non-indentation-based folds manually in each file, and they won't be saved across sessions without using some tricks with :mkview/:loadview.

Basically, this functionality would have to be added to the plugin if you want it to be automatic. I'm willing to review a patch for that, if you want to send one, but I'm not likely to work on it myself.

[yxiong]

I probably won't have the expertise or bandwidth to add this functionality as a pull request. So feel free to close it as "won't fix" or keep it open for future contributors, whichever you prefer.

Thanks again for all the discussion and information, @tmhedberg !