webr chunks: syntax highlighting and execution

[boshek]

👋

I have just started using webr and I realize that it not developed by this team exactly but I am wondering if there is any way in positron to enable syntax highlight and execution of the webr chunks so that they behave identically to a normal r chunk in quarto. Unfortunately at the moment when you switch to a webr chunk you lose all functionality that comes with it. Is there anything I can do to enable this?

Positron Version: 2025.10.0 build 15
Code - OSS Version: 1.103.0
Commit: bca395e
Date: 2025-09-03T07:09:37.439Z
Electron: 37.2.3
Chromium: 138.0.7204.100
Node.js: 22.17.0
V8: 13.8.500258-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

[juliasilge]

Can you share specifically what you mean here by webR "chunk"? Do you mean chunks like this using quarto-live?

https://r-wasm.github.io/quarto-live/getting_started/editor.html

[boshek]

Yes exactly. Sorry for not being clear. I just want them to behave like normal r chunks.

[juliasilge]

Gotcha, that makes sense! Can you open a feature request about this at https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto/issues? We don't currently have a concrete path forward to making the editing experience nice for these types of code chunks but this is something we'd like to work on. I don't believe we have much in the way of a workaround today, because nothing at the editor layer knows (or has any way to know) that these should be treated like R or Python chunks.

[juliasilge]

We might need some way for the quarto-live extension to say how the VS Code extension should treat these chunks:
https://github.com/r-wasm/quarto-live

[boshek]

Right. Thanks will do. And yes I feel like this would be a fairly comment user experience. I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet. Although the webr chunks are obviously unique from regular r chunks (applied to the python/pyodide too) in development, a user is going to want to run that code before they render.

[boshek]

ticket created: quarto-dev/quarto#820