Folding Editors

Partly because the formatting of occam source is important in the language, the original occam IDE, called TDS, enabled you to hide blocks of text behind a single comment line, enabling you to hide sections of the source in order to better see its structure. These blocks were called folds, and used an initial line of text formatted as a comment.

Folding editors provide similar abilities to the outline mode of word processors, but do so with the insertion of special markers rather than using heading levels. This gives you the flexibility hide or show what you require. The markers are generally wrapped to appear as comments in the source files, for example they start with // in C++ source, and # in Perl.

A more detailed introduction to folding can be found on Michael Haardt's web site describing the fe editor.

There are many editors that support folding, and several (such as the XEmacs folding mode) supporting it using user-defined fold markers. The following editors are known at this time:

• TDS3 (Transputer)
• Elcomsoft Origami (main site , Linux (x86 binary) v2, Windows (Win32) Gold Ed, v4)
• F and WinF from TLM Software, Bristol (local copy of WinF).
• WinFold (Windows)
• Michael Haardt's fe (Unix, Windows)
• Ripple (lost link - can anyone tell me where?)
• XEmacs folding mode (indent issues?) (more about this)
• jedit (uses Java)
• The Hessling Editor (THE) (Unix, Windows and others)
• Vim (Version 6 and above) (Unix)
  Also see the patch created by folks at the University of Kent, Canterbury, which enhances the existing Vim support for folds for example to display a fold on its own (Entering the fold).
• KEdit (Windows)
• X2 (Unix, Windows and others)
• Andrew's Editor, review, (Unix, DOS, Windows and others)