Eclipse Finally Gets Code Folding

binarysearch writes "Code folding is finally in the Eclipse project! After more than two years open, Eclipse's Bug 9355 has finally been marked FIXED. Code Folding was the most-voted for bug in Eclipse, with support for J2SE 1.5 features in a close second. Check out the I20040504 Integration build for folding in the Compilation Unit Editor (Class File Editor support is in HEAD). For those who dislike the implementation, it is requested that you create a new bug, rather than reopening 9355."

Comments

Re:Code folding is:

[Elwood P Dowd]

I'm sorry. What on Earth lead you to believe that I have some kind of a problem with FS/OSS development methodologies? I feel that, for good programmers, brace matching and incremental search provide all the "ease of use" that's necessary for living without code folding.

What sort of a response would I have been trolling for?

Re:Code folding is:

[dedazo]

vim does support folding, though it's a little quirky to get just right. Most editors based on Scintilla (which is very popular with the Python crowd) do as well.

first thing that I disabled in netbeans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that people are so happy about this feature. It was the first thing that I turned off in netbeans 3.6. It was a feature that I always wanted in a code editor until I used it and realized that it was only for people who don't read code.

You need to see the code if you're going to write it or understand it.

Feature requests, not bugs?

[Guspaz]

Wouldn't support for code-folding and J2SE 1.5 features be feature requests, and not bugs?

questionable features

[f00zbll]

although the feature is useful and many programs have them. For example several HTML editors have this feature, since many html pages have tons of tables. Having folding is great for documents that are long like HTML. For code I feel it tends to lead to bad habits.

For example, most of the .NET programmers I work with are x-VB guys and they use this alot. what ends up happening is they put all the classes in one file. Which actually leads to a tendency of coding with lots of inner classes. One of the biggest strengths of Java in my mind is it encourages programmers write smaller chunks of code that is more modular and re-usable. If you write your code in a well organized manner, you won't really need folding. Especially since the right pane in Eclipse shows you the methods and allows you to double click and jump to that point quickly.

I read the bug/feature requests and many of the arguments in my mind are personal bias. they aren't really valid. Several people complained Eclipse wasn't usable because it didn't have folding. I question that way of thinking and suggest the user is inflexible and unwilling to adapt. If it's that important, then write it yourself and submit it to eclipse. Needless whining serves no one any good. The time spent whining could be spent coding.

Nope. Just dealing with certain realities.

[Prior Restraint]

Why would an effective java programmer generate methods with 100's of lines of code that need summarizing? Such methods are known to be error-prone and hard to read and understand.

That's what I keep saying to my coworkers. Nevertheless, we have methods over a thousand lines long, and our largest class is hovering around 25kloc (and I assure you, there's little reason for most of that code to be in the same class).

If nothing else, code folding is an effective tool for when you're forced to maintain source code written by idiots.