Question

Despite using Vim for a decade, sometimes I still struggle with folding. Everything in this question is reproducible with no .vimrc in Vim 7.3. I am using foldmethod=marker with default foldmarkers.

Consider the following nested fold structure (using foldmethod=marker and default markers). The first column is the line number (fold0 has zero indent).

 1|{{{ fold0
 2|    {{{ fold1
 3|        {{{ fold2
 4|        }}}
 5|    }}}
 6|}}}

Suppose fold1 and fold2 are both closed and the cursor is on line 2. I can yank and put the closed fold using yyp, but the newly inserted folds are all open.

What I would like is for folds resulting from a “put” command to be closed. Alternatively, is there a convenient way to close them after the “put”? That is, from this position (with the cursor on line 6):

 1|{{{ fold0
 2|+---  4 lines: fold1----------------------------------------
 6|    {{{ fold3
 7|        {{{ fold4
 8|        }}}
 9|    }}}
10|}}}

I can use zc to close fold3, but fold 4 remains open after zo. If instead I use zC, it closes fold3 and fold 0, but fold 4 is still open when I do 2zo. This is not how I would expect recursive fold-closing to work. Is there a way to achieve zc but also recursively closing all contained folds?

The company I work for specifies that folds are defined by matching pairs without an explicit foldlevel, so solutions involving explicit foldlevel are of no use.

Answer 1

The following sequence (after your yyp) seems to do what you want:

v% – visually select from the { under the cursor to the corresponding }

zC – close all folds under the cursor recursively (unfortunately, this includes the outer folds that you want to remain open)

zv – open just enough folds to display the cursor line

zc – close the single outer fold of the new material

Of course, you’d want to map this to some other key combination in your vimrc.