What is the context of a Quarto visual editor for defining VSCode keyboard shortcuts?

[venpopov]

Description

None of my custom defined keyboard shortcuts for R or anything else seem to work when I use quarto Visual Editor in VSCode. The standard context definitions for editor, language, notebook seem to not work. This is preventing a bunch of other extension to work while using the visual editor and my standard workflow shortcuts. In the source editor everything is fine, but I can't seem to find any way to modify keyboard shortcuts in the Visual Editor. Any ideas?

The basic example is inserting the R pipe symbol (|>) with the cmd+shift+m shortcut. I have the following JSON keybindings:

  {
    "description": "R Pipe Operator",
    "key": "cmd+shift+m",
    "command": "type",
    "args": {
      "text": " |> "
    },
    "when": "resourceLangId == 'r' || resourceLangId == 'quarto' || terminalFocus",
  },
  { "description": "R Pipe Operator in terminal",
    "key": "Cmd+Shift+m",
    "command": "workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence",
    "args": {
      "text": " |> "
    },
    "when": "terminalFocus"
  },

Which work in source mode, but not in visual mode.

[mcanouil]

focusedView == quarto.visualEditor?
Or view.quarto.visualEditor.visible.
Actually, it's not a "view".
The correct context should be: activeCustomEditorId == 'quarto.visualEditor'.

[venpopov]

Ok, interesting, I had tried that before but it didn't work. After some experimentation now again, it seems that this is indeed the right context, but the quarto custom editor:

• overwrites any shortcut you define yourself (i.e. it takes absolute priority). You can only define shortcut keys that are not already defined by Quarto, which is the first time I've experienced this with editors in VScode. For example, a custom command works with ctrl+shit+m, but not with cmd+shift+m (which produces some "No diagnostics" bar below code chunks).
• it does not allow commands that operate with content in the editor such as inserting text (e.g. the example with type above), or such as reading the content of a selection

Because of the second issue, I can, for example, use the context to send commands to the terminal, such as workbench.action.terminal.sendSequence. But I cannot insert the pipe operator inside of the quarto editor - nothing happens when the command is type (which works in source mode just fine). And because somehow the quarto editor prevents accessing the content of selected text, custom commands such as this produce errors:

  {
    "description": "R Show Documentation",
    "key": "f1",
    "command": "r.helpPanel.openForSelection",
    "when": "editorLangId == 'r' || editorTextFocus && editorLangId == 'quarto' || activeCustomEditorId == 'quarto.visualEditor'"
  },

Even the Quarto's own contextual Assist Panel which typically shows help information for select R commands seems to suffer from this and does not show any tooltips in visual mode

[venpopov]

"editor.action.insertSnippet" also doesn't work

Is there some command that works with inserting arbitrary text/symbols in the visual editor (like "type" or "editor.action.insertSnippet" work with regular editors)?

[mcanouil]

You'd better take a look at the codebase if you know your way around VSCode extension structure (beware that the Quarto extension has a complex codebase because the Visual Editor is designed to be integrated in several tools): https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto

Regarding what is specifically exposed and how within VSCode or Positron, the specifics are in https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto/tree/main/apps/vscode

You could also take a look at all the already opened issues and if appropriate/necessary open a new one: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto/issues

[venpopov]

I tried that a few weeks ago (which is how I also got to activeCustomEditorId == 'quarto.visualEditor', which until now I thought didn't work) and you are right it's quite complex and without documentation it's hard to know what to look for. Thanks for the pointers though