posit-dev / posit-dev/positron

Data Explorer: Customize display of whitespace or other characters

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#3,072 0 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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area: data explorer enhancement frontend
Dominant language
TypeScript
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Similar to Positron + source files, it may be nice to have a visible display of whitespace characters in the grid. For whitespace, we could use Space: U+00B7 “middle dot”: · with a light-grey color, similar to our planned handling of NULL/NA/NaN etc.

image

I'd vote for a "show whitespace" option that causes the front end to render space characters as middle dots (or tab/arrow symbols, etc).
I think it could be a white space with a :before pseudo-element that adds the middle dot
We'll probably need to do something similar so that copying and pasting content when whitespace is visible doesn't copy the dots

  • @jmcphers

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
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Research direction

Start with the Data Explorer grid and its front-end rendering path, then review the existing or planned handling of NULL, NA, and NaN values. Define how a "show whitespace" option should display spaces and other whitespace, including the shown middle-dot styling and copy/paste behavior. Done means the option renders whitespace visibly without copying display markers into the underlying content.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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