Text Folding in SciTE  

SciTE is a very versatile and entirely customizable text editor. You can use it to type (and even compile !) code, to edit webpages... but I also chose it for NaNoWriMo, mainly because of its text folding abilities.

What's text folding ? It's a way to "compress" blocks of plain text so you only see its first line. Think Summary Mode in Word. This way, you can write your chapter headers, or a quick summary of your scene and develop it later. It even helps you to not be tempted to read your previous scenes ! Just fold them and voilà.

Here's a quick tutorial to add this Text Fold ability to SciTE :

1. Download ExtMan and paste it in your SciTe directory
2. Create a reate a scite_lua directory in your SciTe directory
3. Download TextFold and paste the Fold.lua in it.
4. Open your Global properties files (Options > Open Global Option Files) and add at the bottom the following lines :

ext.lua.startup.script=$(SciteDefaultHome)/extman.lua
text.outline.char=*

Restart SciTE. Now it's time to learn to use the text folding functionality :

• Any text block you want to fold must start with the text.outline.char.
• When you've just added new text blocks and they don't show properly, click Tools > Rescan.
• That's all !
  

If you're interested in SciTE customization, don't forget to visit these pages for further info : ExtMan and Text Folding on Lua-users wiki.

I hope you enjoyed this article. My NaNoWriMo report will be coming soon !