First experience with Positron

[pschloss]

Hey - I tried Positron for the first time on a livestream and ran into a few weird things that I thought I'd run by you. I'm pretty comfortable using RStudio and VS Code, so there's some context for me.

1. I can't get rid of the plot widow or the entire right side window. It pops open whenever I create a new plot. My preferred way of making figures is to save them to a file with the correct dimensions and view the file as a tab in the VSCode/Positron. Having the plot window open repeatedly is frustrating. You can see my efforts here.
2. The background highlighting of colors by name isn't working like it does in RStudio. If I do color = "#FF0000 the hex code will get a red highlight, but if I do color = "red" nothing happens. The background color is helpful for picking different shades of gray quickly without having to build the plot. You can see my efforts here
3. Insert a line break in the middle of a set of arguments starts the new line at the left side of the function name rathe than at the opening parenthesis. But if I put a line break after the opening parenthesis then everything indents to the right of the function name, as expected. Are you trying to enforce some style rules on users or is there a way to get new lines to start at the opening parenthesis? You can see my efforts here

#imagine a long line of text i want to break up across several lines...
geom_text(hjust = 0, vjust = 1, lineheight = 1.2, fontface = "bold")

#what I'm hoping for
geom_text(hjust = 0, vjust = 1,
          lineheight = 1.2, fontface = "bold")

#what Positron does
geom_text(hjust = 0, vjust = 1,
lineheight = 1.2, fontface = "bold")

#what Positron seems to want
geom_text(
  hjust = 0, vjust = 1,
  lineheight = 1.2, fontface = "bold"
)

4. Using ggtext::element_textbox_simple() removes spaces and line breaks causing text to write over itself. ggtext::element_markdown() works. When this would periodically happen in RStudio, it would go away after restarting RStudio. That didn't work here. You can see my efforts here
5. Although I can't reproduce it now, calling up the help from the console with ?geom_text was throwing errors and not bringing up the help. The only help was the Positron help window. You can see my efforts here

Sorry, I'm not sure which of these are bugs, features, or my ignorance :) If you'd rather me post them to the issue tracker I can do that too. Let me know if you want separate issues for each.

Thanks!

[juliasilge]

Thanks for trying out Positron and sharing your thoughts! 🙌

1. Thanks for sharing your preferred approach for making plots. We haven't had other requests for this kind of workflow, but we would welcome a feature request issue to track interest in turning off the integrated Plots support. The main workflows we have designed are more RStudio-like and do in fact use the integrated Plots pane, from which you can pop open to an editor tab and/or save at specified dimensions; ggsave() should work correctly as well.

2. We are tracking improvements in the color decorators in Color decorators do not work inside string #6603, if you'd like to 👍 or add additional detail.

3. We don't currently have support for this style of "hanging" indentation:

geom_text(hjust = 0, vjust = 1,
          lineheight = 1.2, fontface = "bold")

Instead of a lot of bespoke indentation rules like RStudio, we use basic VS-Code-style indentation matching and have built a brand-new modern formatter for R called air; it works similarly to ruff in Python. You can read more about how to use air at https://positron.posit.co/migrate-rstudio-code.html#formatting-r-code-with-air but do be aware it also does not support hanging indentation (posit-dev/air#278).

4. I tried out some ggtext examples such as this one, and it looks like it is rendering correctly to me. Can you create a reprex (a minimal reproducible example) for the problem you are observing? If you are able to find specifically what wasn't working, we would welcome a bug report issue.

5. We've had a few reports of a blank Help pane, and they seem to be happening when machines have some internal proxy config as described in Help/Viewer can be blank due to inappropriate HTTP proxy use #8426. Do you know if you have installed a proxy? I think I would expect it to always fail if so.

[pschloss]

Sorry for the delay in following up...

1. I've found that if I save the ggplot2 workflow to a variable it stops the plot pane from opening. This is good enough for me.
2. I'll check out the color decorators
3. I'll retrain my indenting practices :)
4. I've posted a bug report (Text is weird in images when using {ggtext} and {showtext} in Positron but not in RStudio #9934)
5. The blank help page seems to have resolved itself

Thanks!
Pat