Support folding ranges inside a line

Hey, I have read through the folding-related issues (like #3422, the linked ones and some other ones related to the FoldingRangeProvider API specifically), but I don’t seem to have come across a conversation about inline folding ranges.

Has this been discussed - or is it okay to start a discussion on the topic now?

I am interested in these, because I’d like to improve readability of MarkDown documents (using an extension) by collapsing MarkDown link targets (the URLs - which can be quite long) and instead linkifying the text range (using a DocumentLinkProvider).

Researching the FoldingRange API though, I can see it only has start and end lines, not Positions. Is this an immutable deliberate design decision or something open to alternative with enough support behind it?

I think other possible use cases could be folding of ternary expression branches, one-liner if statements and stuff like that. (But I’m mostly interested in my use-case described above.)

[aeschli]

We currently have no plans for inline foldings. It would require some major work on the editor widget side.

[Will-Wrightwa]

This would enable some Really Awesome language aware functionality. 🔥 Here are some examples.

• markdown
  • fold url link destination
• typescript:
  • hide types
• javascript:
  • fold inline arrow functions
  • fold inline object literals
  • fold function arguments
• python: fold list comprehension
• jsx / html:
  • fold away element props
  • fold away element children
  • fold to self Closing Tag