How to get snippets in Positron?

[LuisLauM]

I am in the process of migrating from RStudio to Positron, but I am missing my custom snippets. Doing an internet search, I can only find one post that talks about snippets now being available in Ark, but it doesn't say anything about what Ark is or how to implement snippets there.

Also, it would be very useful to know how to remove the snippets that arrive by default in Positron. For example, one of those that bothers me the most is the one that applies to the apply family of functions, since it does not show the names of the arguments and that is something that I personally do not like (rule better explicit than implicit).

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help those like me who need that functionality. Thank you very much.

[rmflight]

<Ctrl>+<Shift>+P and start typing "snippets", choose "configure snippets" and then you can start a snippets file, either global, or specific contexts.

I'm not sure where the default one is however, the r.json snippets file in my version of Positron does not have the apply one in it. 🤷

[LuisLauM]

Hi! Yes, precisely in the course of the day I was able to find that way, but it seems to me that it is not the way they refer to in the post of the Issue cited, since there they talk about a less invasive method to suggest the snippets.

For the moment, I am using that method inherited from VS Code and I have developed a small Shinyapp to convert the snippets from RStudio format to this json format, I will leave it over here.

I won't close the question yet to wait for the official answer from one of the Positron team developers who may be able to clarify that version of snippets in Ark.

[DavisVaughan]

As you saw, default snippets for R in Positron are managed here:
https://github.com/posit-dev/ark/blob/main/crates/ark/resources/snippets/r.code-snippets

Ark is effectively the R support for Positron. It manages the snippets because it is in charge of providing the completions for R, which is where snippets come in.

You can add your own using that r.json file mentioned above, but there is currently no way to turn off the ones provided by Ark.

[dkaschek]

The snippets generally seem to work. However, when I tested the ts snippet which calls an R function through `r date()`, it fails and inserts the non-executed R code instead. Do you know if executable R code within R snippets in Positron is not yet supported?

[jennybc]

@dkaschek I'm working on snippets at the moment, by which I mean ... I'm actually going to propose removing the built-in snippets. In my proposal, the snippets dealing with base R reserved words (e.g. for) will just be handled a different way. But the rest, such as the ts snippet you're talking about, would go away. A user could always put their favorites in a personal r.json file for themselves. But remember, this is just a plan I'm experimenting with.

I don't see anything in the code that suggests Positron has ever supported the executable R code in snippets like the ts snippet you point out. So this would be a new feature for us to support.

[dkaschek]

That would be awesome. I am using the feature e.g. in an RStudio snippet in combination with the date() function and the rstudioapi package to get the filename of the currently open file. The snippet then generates an informative header from that information.

[jennybc]

@dkaschek Will you comment on #7234 with your interest in snippets that contain executable R code? That could be a feature request for some sort of bonus type of snippet that ark / the LSP supports.