How to create folds with foldmethod indent in vim?

Question

I am trying to learn how to use folds in vim. Folding manually works great but I would like to know how to fold via indents. I expect it to work like this:

+------
   +--- | //Place marker here and press 'zf'
   +---
+------

Will result in:

+------
<fold>
+------

But I just get

E350: Cannot create fold with current 'foldmethod'

Any ideas why I get this error?

Also, is there a way to create a fold in between curly braces?

Answer 1

If you want an automatic fold based on the indentation you need to set the foldmethod option to indent value

:set foldmethod=indent

And that's the reason probably why you get that error. I suppose it is set like above.

zf{motion} or {Visual}zf Operator to create a fold. This only works when 'foldmethod' is "manual" or "marker". The new fold will be closed for the "manual" method.

you can check your foldmethod to confirm that by :set foldmethod?

whenever you are in a range of lines with the same indentation you need only to click on za so that block will be folded.

If you want to create manually your folds you need to set this time the foldmethod to manual.

Put your cursor on one of the curly braces and type zf% that will fold all the block between {}