New vim Trick (to me)

In a recent class, someone mentioned that the reason they liked the editors in IDEs was that they could collapse comments. Collapsing comments was something I never ever even thought about doing. When I look at source code, I look at it in its entirety. I am old school in that I believe programming can be an art form and that source code should be just functional and nice to look at.

Today, I was cleaning up my many browser tabs and noticed that I had Google'd "vim collapsing comments" which quickly got me to an explanation. This was very simple to turn on and I added a total of three lines to my .vimrc file. The first line turns on folding and instructions vim to use syntax as the guide.

:set foldmethod=syntax

In a few minutes of playing around with C and C++ files, it was clear that is collapses at least comment blocks and the code within {...} sections. There are commands to open (e.g. zo) and close (e.g. zc) folded sections. I quickly recognized that if I were going to use folded sections, I would have to bind these to function keys to make them easier to use.

:map <f9> zo
:map <F10> zc

When I open a file, all foldable sections are hidden. Pressing F9 will expand them and pressing F10 anywhere in the section will collapse it again.
Given that I have been using vi since 1986 without this enabled, it will be interesting to see if I like it or not in the long run. Time will tell.

Someone may wonder about what F1 to F8 do. If anyone expresses interest, I will post that.