quarto-dev / quarto-dev/quarto
VS Code Extension: Don't turn off highlighting of "invisible characters"
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- TypeScript
- Stars
- 645
- Forks
- 62
- Avg merge
- 17h 42m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 13
Description
Bug description
In the VS Code Extension, for some unknown reason the extension ships with
"[quarto]": {
"editor.unicodeHighlight.ambiguousCharacters": false,
"editor.unicodeHighlight.invisibleCharacters": false
},
I git blamed my way back but they seem to be tied to the "great migration" commit which is not useful for gaining context about why this is set
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto/commit/0afac7beaf0924099519235eec51102155599270
I believe that "editor.unicodeHighlight.invisibleCharacters": false is particularly harmful, as it prevents non-breaking spaces from being highlighted. I'd argue that if non-breaking spaces were highlighted, then this user would have been able to figure out their problem much faster:
https://github.com/posit-dev/air/issues/381
Here are the docs for these two settings, I vote we remove the contributed configuration for both of these entirely:
This also aligns with my general principle that extensions should ship as minimal amount of contributed configuration as possible, because it will often just confuse users otherwise.
Steps to reproduce
No response
Actual behavior
No response
Expected behavior
No response
Your environment
No response
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Open apps/vscode/package.json and inspect the contributed [quarto] configuration near line 958. Remove the settings for ambiguousCharacters and invisibleCharacters, then verify that the extension no longer overrides VS Code's unicode highlighting defaults.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- typescript, vscode
- Domain
- devtools
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 1/5
- Estimated time
- Under an hour
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Newbie friendliness
- 50/100