Dropping popped out windows back into the main editor space closes the editor view

Open
#9,463 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
electron, typescript
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Reproduce the issue in Positron by running View(mtcars), popping the result into a new window, and dragging that window back into the editor space. Start by tracing the editor pop-out and window-docking behavior; done means the editor view remains open after the drop and the return-to-editor workflow is addressed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area: ui

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2025.10.0 build 95
Code - OSS Version: 1.103.0
Commit: 743eb32ffe742dc59c56bf019d248c178c9d5841
Date: 2025-09-16T07:11:40.215Z
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

Session details:

Describe the issue:

Popping out a window doesn't have a 'return to editor' button, and when dragging the external window tab back into the main editor space collapses the editor view.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/71c52351-d796-45ea-af39-bd39eec3de40

Steps to reproduce the issue:

  1. View(mtcars)
  2. Pop-out into new window
  3. Drag window back into editor space

Expected or desired behavior:

Shouldn't collapse editor view, and ideally we'd have a dedicated 'return to editor' workflow.

Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
4.3k
Forks
184
Avg merge
1d 9h
Merged PRs (30d)
195

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from posit-dev/positron

All issues in posit-dev/positron

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.