Consider not setting Air as the editor.defaultFormatter

[DavisVaughan]

This is a user setting

air/editors/code/package.json

Line 63 in cf9ff74

"editor.defaultFormatter": "Posit.air"

[DavisVaughan]

We were going to do this in #171 but there are two main reasons we said no right now:

• Positron currently ships a formatter that uses styler (it does not mark it as "default"). This formatter "competes" with ours if we don't set ourselves as the default. You get a silent no-op if you just use Format on Save, and you get prompted to choose a default if you explicitly call Format Document. This was likely the original reason we set editor.defaultFormatter. The right thing to do is to eventually remove the Positron formatter.

https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/blob/2d4492c35638ea01e611dec599e9d6bbd60e9df8/extensions/positron-r/src/formatting.ts#L31

• @lionel- thinks that we may want to unconditionally keep this setting, regardless of what Positron sets. The reasoning was that Air is positioned to be a full language server for R eventually (not just a formatter), and it should be in charge of all the language smarts for R, including setting itself as the default formatter. I tend to disagree, and think that this is a user setting that we should not override. Practically, if a user installed another R formatter extension alongside Air, the user would not get the "multiple formatter" notification that is intended to show up, because we are already positioned as the default. I think that would be a confusing experience (sure, the user can set editor.defaultFormatter in their user settings to switch to the other one, but they aren't told they need to because they don't get this notification). Notably none of rust-analyzer, the Microsoft C++ extension, clangd, or ruff (all language servers that also format, with some doing more than others) set themselves as the default formatter. Instead they typically provide documentation on how to set editor.defaultFormatter and why you might want to, but that's it. I do not actually think there is much upside to setting yourself as the default formatter (besides the current Positron issue), only some potential confusion if another formatter is installed alongside Air.

[lionel-]

My main thought is that a formatter isn't that different from other language features a language extension provides unconditionally for a language, especially when it offers format-as-you-type to fix up indentation (as we will in the future). Having a formatter mixup in that case makes for a confusing experience. And having to set it manually, while it's certainly something that professional developers are accustomed to, is not good user experience for our target audience.

Alternatively we could set the default formatter in positron-r to Air and leave VS Code users on their own for configuration. I think it's a good default though, even if unconventional in the vscode landscape (which I agree is a good argument not to do it).