Formatting Quarto files with Air is incredibly slow

[ppm1337]

Description

As mentioned in other discussions, I have code formatting settings in VSCode like these:

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

I really like Air and have no issues with it for my normal R files. However, for my QMD files (R and CSS chunks only, rendered with knitr), formatting is incredibly slow. When I save my file, I usually need to stare at the "Running Code Actions and Formatters..." notification in VSCode for about 1 minute, which is extremely frustrating (for context, my QMD file has about 1600 lines across ~160 chunks).

Furthermore, my environment gets polluted with dozens of .vdoc.* files (e.g. .vdoc.f83e908b-5741-4f8e-9ebf-738a16d010e9.r) that are not cleaned up properly, so I have to do delete them manually to keep my environment clean.

Is anybody else experiencing these issue? What did you do about it?

It's also hard to find resources on code formatting in Quarto because neither Google nor the search in the Quarto docs can distinguish between "document formats" (e.g. HTML, PDF, ...) and code formatting.

Edit:
My VSCode extension quarto.quarto is version 1.136.0.

[mcanouil]

The "quarto" extension basically extracts the code to give to the formatter from other extensions, that's why there are "virtual docs", i.e., vdoc. Those files stick around only when something wrong happens like the process is interrupted for various reasons (no disk space left, CPU on high load, etc.).

Note that even in a terrible environment I never got "dozens" of .vdoc" files.
This could be related to the size of your document or something specific to your environment (extensions conflicts, etc.)

Nearly all formatters cannot run on Quarto document and figure out by themselves what is what inside it.

This is likely to improve with q2 the next major iteration of Quarto, but the team is heavily working on it and it isn't quite ready.

In the meantime, in the community, Johan Larsson took a stab at this tricky issue and created a tool which comes with an extension for VSCode.

• https://github.com/jolars/panache

[ppm1337]

Panache looks promising, I will give it a try. Good luck with q2, looking forward to Quarto in Rust!

[ppm1337]

Switching from Air to Panache + Arity solved both issues.

[cderv]

Furthermore, my environment gets polluted with dozens of .vdoc.* files (e.g. .vdoc.f83e908b-5741-4f8e-9ebf-738a16d010e9.r) that are not cleaned up properly, so I have to do delete them manually to keep my environment clean.

Be sure to update latest version of Quarto Extensions regularly. And if you found issues in Positron or VSCODE, you can open a report with some information for us and others to investigate at https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto

This is where the Quarto Extension for VSCODE lives.

Thank you.

[ppm1337]

Thanks for the hint. I was considering to open a GH issue but struggled to create a MRE. The problem with the .vdoc files not being cleaned up properly appeared to happen only with larger QMD files.

[cderv]

There may be still opened issue on vdoc problems. Hopefully this will really be solved in the future by better support. vdoc is the way it works currently but this may change. Larger design problem though - if we can fix in the meantime this would be great.

Search the repo there and see previous reports on this - maybe there is something related.

I see you solved with Panache + another tool, I don't know how they work but maybe there is something we can help with in Air or else.