Add a quarto format command integrated with air format

[maikol-solis]

Description

Hey everyone,

A few days back, I asked about using the formatter with Quarto files in the air repo. The response was that Quarto should handle formatting on its own.

Thus, I imagine a new option format which is called like this:

$ quarto format file.qmd

And behind the scenes, it uses air format on every code chunk.

There's a similar idea for python chunks with the black-formatter project.

What do you think?

Best.

[mcanouil]

Formatting is usually the job of the IDEs or formatters.

The Quarto VSCode extension handles formatting with your default formatters (see for example the discussion about setting air as default formatter for VSCode).
If you change your formatter inside Positron/VSCode/Codium, you should be able to format with whatever you want, including air.
A VSCode extension can embed the tool as autopep8 or black.
In the case of R, the default formatter is usually styler which is used by the R extension for VSCode.

You could also use the exact same approach as the Quarto extension you mentioned which formats at render time.

This being said, I doubt the team will implement such formatter inside Quarto, because there are a lot of formatters and Quarto is language agnostic, so if it includes an opinionated formatter for one language, then it will "have to" to do it for all other languages and maintain those extra dependencies which will be very impractical and very time consuming.

[malcolmbarrett]

yeah, Posit is kicking around which team's job this is but at the end of the day, I need to be able to run a single command to format everything in my directory. Something's got to give here. It might not be Quarto's job, but it's got to be somebody's. Quarto is language agnostic, but Quarto, Positron, and air are all Posit tools. They should work together easily.

[mcanouil]

They should work together easily.

They do via the IDE.

[malcolmbarrett]

One at a time they do, but not a whole project of R and Quarto files

[cscheid]

yeah, Posit is kicking around which team's job this is

Hey there! I'd like to ask you to extend a bit more kindness to everyone involved here. There's more coordination that needs to happen here than you might have realized, and we are in fact working to make something like this work.

[malcolmbarrett]

My frustration with being told by more than one team that this wasn't their job or that it already worked may have led to poor wording, but I'm not reading bad faith into the actions of the various teams, and I would rather you did not read bad faith into my comments. You would know that I'm a long-time supporter of Posit's open-source contributions and the many excellent developers that make it happen. So, I apologize that my wording came off cross, and I would like to ask you to extend the same good faith to me.