Is there a "Continue comment on new line" option?

[etiennebacher]

RStudio has a nice option "Continue comment when inserting new line" (in the "Code" tab of the global options). However, I don't see a similar feature in Positron. When I search for "continue comment" in the settings, the only option that pops up comes from the Rust-analyzer extension.

Am I missing something? Is this already requested somewhere? I didn't see related issues when searching for "comment new line"

[sharon-wang]

I think you're right that there isn't an equivalent to RStudio's "Continue comment when inserting new line" option in Positron at this time 👍

I've opened an issue to track this request: #5974. If there's anything else you'd like to highlight, please feel free to comment there!

[juliasilge]

Just as a heads up @etiennebacher we had some discussion for #6049 that you may want an update on. There is not currently a straightforward way to put this kind of behavior behind a setting, so the choices were to turn on RStudio-style comment continuation behavior for all users or no users. We could not get to consensus that we should try out having it on by default.

Instead, we are adding some limited continuation for regular # comments, when your cursor is in the middle of a line. If | represents your cursor, the situation is this:

# this cursor| will continue the comment

# this cursor will not continue the comment|

This is consistent with the Python behavior for # comments.

[etiennebacher]

Thank you for the heads up @juliasilge, I appreciate it. I think that's a fair compromise, I agree having comments to continue on a new line when the cursor is at the end is probably not a default for many people.

There is also this comment in the linked conversation:

It's also worth considering that once we have a stronger story for refilling / word-wrapping comments (e.g. via air formatting) hitting enter at the end of the line to continue a comment will not be a necessary or recommended workflow since manual wrapping is often wrong.

It this is supported eventually then manually breaking lines in comment won't be necessary anymore, so I'm very much looking forward to it.

[etiennebacher]

Also I'm unsure whether this makes this discussion "answered" or not, so I'll let you decide on this.