Any plans for an edit_positron_settings() function for examining/editing Positron's settings.json?

[davidkane9]

Hello! usethis is a great package! Functions like edit_r_profile() are wonderful, both for advanced users and for new students.

Are there any plans to add a function like edit_positron_settings() for examining/editing the settings.json file which controls Positron? I (and my students) would definitely use this, if it were available.

[jennybc]

The new use_air() function (#2109) crosses this Rubicon, so yes I can imagine this happening. But that PR also surfaced a pretty big problem which is that jsonlite is currently not set up to help edit JSONC:

#2109 (comment)

I don't think we can really dig in to editing this file without such a capability.

jeroen/jsonlite#394

[jennybc]

Another feature of real .vscode/settings.json files that is at least tolerated by VS Code and Positron is trailing commas. So that is another thing that would be appealing in a very lenient JSON parser, in addition to comment support.

I'm talking about the comma after "Posit.air-vscode" here:

{
    "[r]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true,
        "editor.defaultFormatter": "Posit.air-vscode",
    },
    "[quarto]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true,
        "editor.defaultFormatter": "quarto.quarto"
    }
}

I had the above (by accident, actually) and saw this when playing around with use_air():

use_air()
#> Error in parse_con(txt, bigint_as_char): parse error: invalid object key (must be a string)
#>           er": "Posit.air-vscode",     },     "[quarto]": {         "e
#>                      (right here) ------^

It's not a great error.

[jennybc]

I think I would also want Positron itself to report the location of the targetted settings file versus (trying) to replicate the logic here in usethis, for all OSes, server vs. desktop, etc etc. So that means we'd need to expose something in the Positron API.