Still no column level folding in VIM.

I used to think that VIM was right there on the 'cutting edge' of new editing concepts. I remember encountering Origami (the original project is dead I guess, can't find a good link) while I was in college. It have this novel idea of 'folding' lines so that you could hide large sections of a file. I thought, interesting. Not long after that feature was incorporated into VIM (no I'm not going to look up version numbers and embarrass/age myself!). A few years ago I had heard that someone had written a patch for VIM that enabled horizontal folding to offer similar advantages to the line level folding: simplification. I didn't think much of it, but stashed it away...confidant that *someday* it'd be part of VIM (if it were useful).

Well. Its been several years, and I just realized that Intelli has incorporated it into their own editor, and it is useful. Screenshot:


See the little <->? That's folding along the horizontal line. If you have the 'vi' plugin in Intellij it even acts like a fold: type 'zo' to open it. You get a lot longer string (sorry I'd type it out but blogger's editor doesn't like <> in that particular combination). I couldn't say I saw a use for horizontal folding before...but I do now! So much more readable with folding. I want it in VIM!

Note: I've been using the AnsiEsc.vim plugin for a little while, and I didn't even realize that it'd been specifically written to take advantage of Vince Negri's patch. Shame on me. One more reason to compile MacVim.