🧠 Smart Folding — WebStorm-Style Code Folding for VS Code

Bring JetBrains/WebStorm's beloved folding experience to VS Code: single-line folds, a big clickable {...} badge, readable comment previews, and a cursor that always comes back to where you left it. ✨

🎹 No fold/unfold keybindings are contributed — Smart Folding reacts to VS Code's built-in fold/unfold commands, so it works with your keymap (IntelliJ IDEA Keybindings, Alt+W, the Command Palette, or the gutter chevrons). The only keybinding contributed is a conditional Ctrl+C/Cmd+C override for smartFolding.clipboardCopy (active only while smartFolding.copyFoldedBlocks is enabled), which copies whole collapsed blocks instead of broken visible rows.

🚀 Features

🧩 WebStorm-style single-line folds

A collapsed block renders as one line — the closing bracket is folded away too:

function activate(context: vscode.ExtensionContext) {...}

🏷️ A real {...} badge (clickable!)

• The block's own opening { is visually hidden and a themed {...} badge takes its place (also [...] / (...) for arrays and groups).
• 🖱️ Click the badge (or hover → Expand) to unfold that block.
• ⚡ Alt+click the badge to expand the block recursively — folded descendants included. The modifier follows VS Code's editor.multiCursorModifier setting (set it to ctrlCmd for Ctrl/Cmd+click).
• 🎨 Colors are theme-aware with separate dark/light overrides.
• 🧲 The badge sticks right after the visible code — BEFORE end-of-line decorations from other extensions such as GitLens inline blame.

💡 Click-to-expand UX note: Because the VS Code Extension API does not provide direct DOM click events for text decorations, clicking a badge is detected via editor caret movement (onDidChangeTextEditorSelection). If your cursor is already parked directly on the opening bracket (e.g. bracket-matching border is active), click slightly towards the middle/right of the badge or use the hover tooltip's [Expand] action. You can also enable "smartFolding.clickLineToExpand": true to expand by clicking anywhere on the collapsed line.

💬 Comment folding with readable previews

• Multi-line block comments & JSDoc fold — and so do runs of consecutive whole-line // comments (new in 1.4).
• The entire comment — /** header included — collapses into the gray badge, which shows the comment's first meaningful text line (WebStorm style), truncated to a configurable length:

/** Remembers the cursor position when folding… */

• 🙅 Single-line comments like /* one liner */ are never collapsed (unlike WebStorm's /**...*/).

📍 Remember & restore the cursor

• Fold All (Remember Cursor) stores your exact cursor line and column and scroll position.
• Any later unfold that frees that line — Unfold All, Unfold Recursively, plain Unfold, a chevron click, any shortcut — puts the cursor right back and scrolls it into view.
• Detection is self-verifying (a silent selection probe checks whether the remembered line is really reachable), so it works for every block in the file regardless of scroll position — not just blocks near the viewport. (fixed in 1.3)

🔦 Smart Unfold (focus mode)

After a Fold All, Smart Unfold opens only the parent chain around your remembered cursor and keeps every other block folded — instant focus on what you were editing.

📦 Commands (Command Palette)

💡 You don't have to use these commands — the built-in editor.foldAll / editor.unfoldAll / editor.unfold / editor.unfoldRecursively (with your own keybindings) are detected automatically.

⚙️ Settings

Language coverage note (takeover): Smart Folding's scanner does not yet safely model the language-specific multiline literals of C, C++, C#, Java and PHP (raw strings, verbatim/interpolated strings, text blocks, heredoc). Those languages keep native VS Code folding even when listed in smartFolding.languages — they are excluded from both the folding-provider registration and the defaultFoldingRangeProvider takeover until support lands.

🛠️ Build & Install

npm install
npx @vscode/vsce package   # produces smart-folding-1.4.0.vsix

Then in VS Code: Extensions → ⋯ → Install from VSIX…

🧪 Development

npm run build              # tsc -p ./
npm test                   # unit tests (node --test on out/test)
npm run test:parity        # tsserver parity harness (lenient extras reporting)
npm run test:parity:strict # strict mode: unexpected extras fail (CI)
npm run test:integration   # real extension-host tests (needs a display / xvfb)

The folding scanner and all detection logic live in src/core/folding.ts as pure, unit-tested functions. The parity fixtures in fixtures/parity/ are diffed against a real tsserver; intentional WebStorm divergences are recorded in fixtures/parity/allowlist.json.

📖 See TESTING.md for the detailed testing architecture (unit, parity, and integration tiers).

📄 License

MIT © 2026 SeyMi