IMO that's just compensating for the inadequacy of tools by making code harder to follow. Usefulness of code folding (and what it says about the code it's folding) aside, this is a really poor solution. If you just need that done temporarily, why not temporarily replace all the returns in the region you select, and then add them back when you're done? Any editor with search-and-replace can do that.
> For example, if not using an ORM, I might want to use SQL to grab some results from a db (in a model, say), and I almost never want to think about my SQL and my surrounding code in the same context. Now, you might say, "Just put that SQL in its own method with a reasonably short name, and call it where you would otherwise have a long SQL string, and in the function that returns it, you can break each line at 70-80 characters,"
No, what I might say is "just stop thinking about the SQL query and the surrounding code in the same context".
Alternatively, put the SQL query in a separate function that conveys some meaning related to its purpose, so that people who read your code later don't have to decipher a 300-character query line in order to understand what that code is doing. They may not even be debugging that part of it, maybe something several layers of abstraction above borks and they end up in that part of the code debugging it.
> (easy to find a given key, but consumes lots of vertical space)
which can be easily averted with code folding? Or by simply scrolling down to the body of your code. Skipping entire lines is very easy, it's following a hundred-character snake that sucks.
