Code cell in Positron Script?

[frumh002]

Hey all,

I'm trying to get more experience in Positron - coming from R Studio. I noticed that in an R script in Positron I can create a code cell (image below). I use these regularly in quarto as code chunks. Is this the same thing? Or what is the functionality of a code cell within an R script? How is it different than a chunk in quarto for example?

Thanks!

[juliasilge]

It is not quite the same thing, no! It is based on the Jupyter-like code cells that other IDEs support:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py#_jupyter-code-cells
• https://docs.spyder-ide.org/4/panes/editor.html#defining-code-cells

And it is similar to the knitr "spin" syntax:

• https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/spin.html

In fact, you can also make these kinds of cells with #+ in addition to # %%.

I would say that I use Quarto when I'm really writing a whole document with narrative and code, but I would use these code cells in a regular .R script where I want to section out code in a structured way (mainly to use that "Run Cell" command).

[frumh002]

Ah ok thanks. related to another issue I encountered then (#7713), would using code cells allow me to re-rerun previous code cells? Or is that functionality still not the right way to think about it? For example, if I put code for a chart in a code cell, can I use the keybindings to rerun that over and over? I've tried it but it just keeps moving up code cells instead of rerunning the same cell. Thanks for helping me understand this better!

[juliasilge]

If you have code like this:

# %%
plot(1:10)

# %%
sample(1:100, 10)

# %%
plot(pressure)

And your cursor is in the first code block, you can click the little "Run Cell" decoration to run only that cell and not move where your cursor is. You are supposed to be able to use the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run that cell in the same way, but what I observe is that it does source() instead. I'll open an issue to fix that.

As a workaround for now, you could bind the command positron.runCurrentCell to a different keyboard shortcut, if you like!

[juliasilge]

I opened #8637 to fix up the keyboard shortcuts in .R files with code cells.