27

By "VS Code" I mean the lightweight text editor not the monolithic IDE, unfortunately searching this on google will bring up many pieces of irrelevant information about how to do this in Visual Studio.

To the question itself, Anybody knows how to hide arbitrary selected lines of code in "Visual Studio Code", preferably into a plus sign like collapsing does?

Note: this is different than collapsing nested code which probably could be achieved by Ctrl+K,Ctrl+<num> , what I need here is to hide specific block of code of choice, no matter nested or not.

EDIT: I see there are people who don't understand my requirements.

for example, you may think what I want is this:

before hiding:

for i in j:
    for k in i:
        for l in k:
            somestuff...

after hiding:

[+] for i in j: ...

What I actually want is this:

before hiding:

# doing stuff about a
a = ClassA()
a.bar()
a.i = 2
a.j = 3
a.k = 5

after hiding:

[+] ...  ( doing stuff about a )

2017.10.17 EDIT: turns out VS Code implemented a very similar feature called "Folding Regions" in VS Code 1.17.1 Update. link

Sajuuk
  • 2,667
  • 3
  • 22
  • 34

5 Answers5

54

You can use the following delimiters for code folding:

C/C++:       #pragma region and #pragma endregion
C#:          #region and #endregion
CSS:         /* #region */ and /* #endregion */
Java:        //region and //endregion
JavaScript:  //#region and //#endregion and //region and //endregion
PHP:         #region and #endregion
Powershell:  #region and #endregion
Python:      #region and #endregion
VB:          #Region and #End Region

See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/12146 ([folding] fold regions)

Brian Burns
  • 20,575
  • 8
  • 83
  • 77
15

In the Insiders Build v1.70 now is the functionality and command to truly hide arbitrary lines of code. The command is

Create Manual Folding Range from Selection
editor.createFoldingRangeFromSelection

It is bound to Ctrl+K Ctrl+, by default. Select any lines you want to fold.

You can unfold those lines either by clicking the gutter folding controls or this command when the cursor is somewhere on the folded line:

Remove Manual Folding Ranges
editor.removeManualFoldingRanges

The above command is bound to Ctrl+K Ctrl+. by default.

fold selected lines demo

Mark
  • 143,421
  • 24
  • 428
  • 436
12

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that VSCode currently allows you to hide an arbitrary selection of code like Visual Studio does via Ctrl+M,Ctrl+H. For now you could use the code folding feature, which depends on indentation. That is, if you indent the code you want to hide, you could then collapse it via Ctrl+Shift+[, like so:

code folding in vscode

Obviously, this is kind of an ugly solution to your problem; it requires multiple steps and makes actual changes to the file. Also, it's clearly useless if you're writing in a whitespace-dependent language like Python, but I don't think you are going to find a better solution short of finding an extension (or writing one yourself). It also might be worth posting an issue on the official VSCode GitHub repo if this feature is important to you.

Nacimota
  • 22,395
  • 6
  • 42
  • 44
  • In retrospection your answer was creative and almost correct at that moment, sorry that I didn't choose you because this might not work in some indent sensitive languages. – Sajuuk Dec 10 '18 at 12:55
  • @Sajuuk no worries, I conceded that as part of the answer. Ideally it should be something vscode does by itself. – Nacimota Dec 10 '18 at 16:15
  • Dissecting some C code right now, and trying to hide chunks of code beyond just folding it. The indentation trick didn't work for some reason, but I added `#if 1` and `#endif` around the blocks I wanted to hide and that got it done :) Thanks for the idea! – Dave Ceddia Aug 29 '21 at 18:47
3

Here is the vs code documentation for folding a selection.

To hide: Highlight the lines you want to fold then press Ctrl+K then Ctrl+,

To unhide: Just click the ">" icon to the left of the row of the folded code or press Ctrl+K then Ctrl+.

Matt Thurmond
  • 51
  • 4
-1

Comment with a delimiter with decreased indentation. Hiding then works as in nested, with the little arrow on the left.

see here

# Below here comes the code to hide.
    a = ClassA()
    a.bar()
    a.i = 2
    a.j = 3
    a.k = 5
kangkon.
  • 21
  • 4