Thursday 19 July 2012

An Immodest Proposal: Show Me the Code

I've been doing a lot of CoffeeScript work lately, along with Ruby with Rails and Sinatra. Especially with regards to my CoffeeScript, I've moved away from my recent Ruby-coloured "your code should be all the documentation you need" philosophy.

I've found all kinds of uses for Markdown, particularly including docco.coffee, written by the developer of CoffeeScript itself. Docco "is a quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator. It produces HTML that displays your comments alongside your code. Comments are passed through Markdown, and code is passed through Pygments syntax highlighting." It may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the output does make complex yet deliberately-written code much clearer.

The downside to well-commented code, of course, is that it gets bulky. One of my larger CoffeeScript files has ~140 lines of actual code, engulfed in a source file that currently tops 330 lines. Ouch.

I was working on it just now, and an idea popped into my head: the "proposal" of the title.

Comments should be selectively elided or folded, in a fashion similar to the code folding feature offered by most modern editors.

I meander around between four different editors on my Mac (TextMate, Sublime Text 2, Komodo IDE and MacVim), and none of them appear to support such a feature out-of-the-box.

Does anybody know of a plugin for any of the above that does this?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Maybe a little late for this but, RubyMine does code folding for multi-line comments in CoffeeScript, Ruby and all of the languages supported by JetBrains. In my mac the shortcuts are folds: command + '-'
unfolds: command + '+'

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