Implement an indentation provider to support folding of docstrings, comments & multi line strings

We might want to consider disabling the folding provider in this release due to a number of issues in VS Code:

• https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/50992
• https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/50991
• https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/50990

Came across this today and found it very annoying. Was unable to collapse a large python file, initially assumed it was an intermittent VSC issue, later looked into this and found that its worse than I suspected.

Basically us introducing a custom folding provider breaks the VSC default folding behavior we won't be able to collapse, any block of Python code

@brettcannon cc

[beltekylevi]

Is there any update or alternative solution for this issue?

[MicaelJarniac]

I’ve been looking for this as well, and until there’s a better solution, we can use # region and # endregion around the docstring to explicitly inform VS Code that it should be a foldable region. From my testings, it worked pretty well, the docstring was still identified correctly, and all other foldable regions remained intact.

Another option is to use an extension such as https://github.com/zokugun/vscode-explicit-folding that allows us to manually define what should be used to delimit foldable regions, for example with a regex. A problem I’ve had with this one (although I haven’t experimented much) was that it seems to completely replace the foldable regions, and not just add to them, so when I was using it, the only foldable regions I had were the ones between """s, that I manually defined. An example configuration for Python is provided on its readme.

Example with # region and # endregion

def greet(name: str) -> str:
    # region
    """Greets a person

    Parameters
    ----------
    name : str
        Name of the person to greet

    Returns
    -------
    str
        Greetings for said person
    """
    # endregion

    return f"Hello, {name}. Nice to meet you!"