Question

Is there any way in gvim to obtain a clickable code folding margin, similar to the one available in diff mode? Please refer the diff mode screenshots attached.

Note that I am comfortable using the keyboard commands for code folding, but sometimes clicking is more convenient.

I have searched on the internet and also here. I have only found material which explains the keyboard commands, but nothing about the clickable option.

Edit I use gvim version 7.0.

Answer 1

Assuming that folding has been set up for your filetype (i.e. you can use keyboard commands like za), you just need to enable the fold column with a specified width, e.g.:

:set foldcolumn=4

---

If you set this globally, it will always be there. If you only want to enable it for certain filetypes (that actually have folding), and/or adapt the width to the amount of nested folding, use :setlocal foldcolumn=... instead, and put the corresponding commands into ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/<filetype>.vim, where <filetype> is the actual filetype (e.g. java). (This requires that you have :filetype plugin on.)

Alternatively, you could define an :autocmd FileType <filetype> setlocal foldcolumn=... directly in your ~/.vimrc, but this tends to become unwieldy once you have many customizations.