Hello,

I am very impressed with Processing. It makes coding fun. I would like to contribute to the development process by adding a feature that would make things easier (for me, potentially for others too)...

I have the bad habit of writing verbal code. Soon the processing text area gets jammed and the scroll bar get tiny. I would like to add some sort of code folding mechanism (see jEdit).

I am thinking of a simple parser hack like an indentation recognition or a comment parser, say

//fold stuff
 code
//unfold

Can anybody explain how to mess up with the processing code?  to achieve something like that?

best,
-Stelios

A Scintilla-based editor (for example), like SciTE (which I use daily) or Notepad++, have code folding built into the lexer (the stuff coloring the code depending on language's syntax).
In general, folding is done on code blocks. For Java, it folds on braces {} so you can "hide" the content of setup(), draw() or whole classes for example.
Note that you have something similar in Eclipse, among others.

AFAIK, it must be built in the editor itself, so it can still track on which line we are, unfold code where an error is reported, etc.

I was tempted to hack a bit the current editor, as there are some unsatisfying limitations (eg. Shift+Tab doesn't work on a single line!) but I don't know if it is worth it, there are rumors about replacing it with something more elaborated (like Eclipse's editor?).