Folding: Design Criteria, draft

[Randy Kramer]

On Wednesday 05 March 2008 06:57 am, Aaron Hsu wrote:
> Just as an end-user who happens to read this list, could I possibly pop
> in and give my opinion? 

No, absolutely not. ;-)  (I hope you recognize that I'm kidding!)

> If all of you were to work towards some kind of 
> code folding, I really like the code folding available in BBEdit from
> Bare Bones software. I find it simple, elegant, and useful. Maybe, you
> could take a look at that?

No philosophical objection to doing so, but maybe you could help us some more.  
I did some quick googling, and won't have time to get into it today, but it 
raised some questions:

   * I guess BBEdit started as a Mac / Apple editor, and is not free--do you 
run it under Linux by any chance?  Is there a version for Linux or Windows?

   * Do you know of any sites or reviews that discuss / describe the outlining 
features?

   * Is there a shareware / free version of BBEdit that I could try out on my 
Linux machine.  (I do have access to an old and slow Windows95 machine as 
well.)

   * But better (easier for me ;-)--can you tell us what you see as being 
useful features in BBEdit, and especially, which of those (if any) contrast 
with the criteria we're starting to put together for nedit folding?

Aside: If BBEDit just sounds/seems simpler because the criteria document 
sounds complicated and is perhaps hard to read, that's not the intention--the 
(my) intent is (as others have expressed much better in similar contexts) to 
have folding in nedit that makes (keeps) simple things simple, and complex 
things possible.  

It's hard for me to explain exactly how we'd accomplish that immediately, but 
I'd think that a combination of user defaults, readily accessible user 
commands for the simple functions, and similar will target the goal of 
keeping the simple things simple, while changing user defaults or issuing 
more arcane (?) commands will allow us to do the complex things.

Also, we probably won't get everything I'd like to have in the first versions 
of folding--as much as possible I'd like to see that the initial versions 
don't preclude (or make particularly difficult) the eventual evolution to the 
more complex functionality.

Thanks,
Randy Kramer