Sublime Forum

Readability feature: conceal (visual substitution of words)

#1

Is there such a feature (sometimes referred to as ‘conceal’), that is, visual substitution (or auto-hiding) of user-defined words/sequences?
Just for example, in C++ I want to make some sequences appear as single greek symbol Ξ:
So for example I want to make types in declarations collapsed:

int a = 1;
float b = 2.0;

Will become in conceal mode:

Ξ a = 1;
Ξ b = 2.0;

And toggle visibility of original text if need to see/edit it by e.g. pressing some hotkey.
With this feature I don’t have to use domain-specific language and convert actual text back and forth,
but only see it on the screen like that and toggle between the two on-the-fly.
AFAIK this feature exists already in some editors, e.g. Vim , Sourceinsight IDE .
(though I haven’t test it, so can’t say for sure how exactly it works there)
I believe it is very powerful feature, especially useful for some hard-to-read languages like C/C++, i.e. it can dramatically improve readability by ‘hiding’ types of initialized variables, etc.

So please tell if there is such possibility, and if not please discuss it for a possible
feature request.

1 Like

#2

You can probably get this to work with code folding & a plugin that automatically or on demand folds away these words/sequences. A plugin that does similar things is https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SyntaxFold

0 Likes