Re: Arbitrary folding in emacs

[Nicolas Richard]

Tim Visher <tim.visher@gmail.com> writes:
> I too would be interested in being able to hide away a region as vim
> is capable of, but I've never heard of a feature like that in Emacs.
> It might be a very useful extension to hs-minor-mode.

outline.el has outline-flag-region, but
(i) it doens't use an ellipsis and
(ii) it is not interactive.

you can test it by selecting some part of the buffer then
M-: (progn (outline-flag-region (region-beginning) (region-end) t) (sit-for 4) 
(outline-flag-region (region-beginning) (region-end) nil))

(sit-for is just there to see the effect before cancelling it with the
'nil' 3rd argument)

I think it doesn't exist because it requires to mark a portion of the
buffer, whereas emacs has capabilities to be smarter than that (via
hideshow or outline and some others yet), and emacs doesn't want to make
non-smart things too easy. At least that's my conclusion after some time
of using emacs and grumbling about the feature not being present :p

-- 
Nico.