Define a fold that can not be searched, and that isn't affected by other fold commands?

Question

POD is a markup file that is used by Perl. It's a pretty unreasonable documentation format that has nothing to do with perl (accept for being the only known use-case), and it's sometimes found intermingled with code. Think MarkDown-nroff hybrid, but optimized to distract the user from anything they may be doing. You can find more information on it from the official docs on perlpod, and perlpodspec.

I would like to fold POD, but in such a way that the

• the fold isn't affected by generic operations (zF to unfold all) unless I'm explicitly targeting that fold, and for it to otherwise not-expand unless requested.
• for it to not be searched when I do /

I just don't want to be bothered with POD inside the document.

Answer 1

You can probably use foldexpr to do this.

Here is a gist written by a person on the Internet. It defines a foldexpr function for folding the POD format.

I tried it on a random Perl script I found on this site (warning no https).

The foldexpr seems to work okay. It might work well enough for your use case that you can tweak it.

On the example script I found it managed to hide most but not all of the POD documentation.

+   +-- 11 lines: !/usr/local/bin/perl---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                   [--clearDb] [--writeToDb]
                                   --path path --division name
                                   --out name

+   +--  2 lines: Examples:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        perl parseRefSeqGenomes.pl --help

        perl parseRefSeqGenomes.pl --man

        #   Load all RefSeq data:

        perl parseRefSeqGenomes.pl --clearDb --writeToDb
                                   --path /data/genomes --division bct
                                   --out bct.genomes.pep.fasta

+   +-- 82 lines: =head1 DESCRIPTION-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+   +-- 16 lines: package main;----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        #   Check arguments.

        my( $help, $man, $clearDb, $writeToDb, $division, $path, $outFileName );

        Getopt::Long::GetOptions(
            'help'          =>  \$help,
            'man'           =>  \$man,
            'clearDb'       =>  \$clearDb,
            'writeToDb'     =>  \$writeToDb,
            'division=s'    =>  \$division,
            'path=s'        =>  \$path,
            'out=s'         =>  \$outFileName );

        #   Check for requests for help or for man (full documentation):

        Pod::Usage::pod2usage( -verbose => 1 ) if ( $help );
example.pl