Feedback for the new (?) testing interface

[etiennebacher]

I installed Positron 2025.05.0 build 75 and it seems that the testing interface for R packages has changed at some point between January and today.

Before, Ctrl+Shift+T would use the "Terminal" tab to run devtools::test() and display the results as they would be if this function was run in the R console.

Now, Ctrl+Shift+T shows a special UI on the left column. However, I noticed that on this new interface:

• there seems to be the same information displayed twice in different places? This is what it looks like for me (I only used the shortcut to use a side-by-side layout, no more layout customization), why are there two places with the list of tests and the green ticks?

• launching the tests and then clicking on the "stop" button doesn't immediately stop the test processes (in the video I click several times on the "stop" button). Instead, it seems to be delayed, maybe because those tests are run in parallel. The previous way to run tests would stop immediately when hitting Ctrl+C.

Screencast.from.2025-05-04.17-22-47.webm

[juliasilge]

Thanks for taking this functionality out for a drive! 🙌

If you decide you really prefer the old behavior, you can still run that command from the command palette:

And you can change the keyboard shortcut to use that one, if you prefer it.

On your first point, the pane on the left is meant to be all tests in the folder with their latest results, while the small pane to the right of the "Test Results" panel is meant to show you results from the most recent test run. You can run one file of tests, or an individual test, for example, and that shows up there as a test run.

You are correct that "stop" doesn't work quite right; we are tracking that in #2636 (comment). If you'd like to see other known issues with the Text Explorer (what this UI is called), check them out here.