Consistency needed CLI/WEB: "code cell" or "code chunk"?

[mcanouil]

Discussed in #6151

^{Originally posted by mine-cetinkaya-rundel July 9, 2023}
Quarto documentation refers to both "code chunks" and "code cells". Quarto internals generally refer to code cells. It would be good if we could settle on a term and use it, but this might be impossible. I still wanted to record this discussion here, in case others have thoughts and want to chime in.

Some points to keep in mind:

• R Markdown and knitr refer to them as "chunks"
• Jupyter refers to them as "cells" (https://jupyterbook.org/)
• Pluto.jl also refers to them as "cells" (https://plutojl.org/)

---

^{Originally posted by mcanouil July 15, 2023}
Few statistics:

• In https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web:
  • "code chunk" is used 94 times in 36 files.
  • "code cell" is used 269 times in 90 files.
• In https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli:
  • "code chunk" is used 61 times in 18 files.
  • "code cell" is used 138 times in 41 files.

[mine-cetinkaya-rundel]

Something to keep in mind is that RStudio IDE menus should be aligned too.

• In the visual editor:

The Insert anything menu calls them "chunk"s:

But in the Insert menu they're called "Executable cell":

• In both the source and visual editors:

The green button calls then a "chunk":

I believe R Markdown will continue to call these chunks, therefore if the RStudio menu were to be aligned with Quarto terminology, it would need to be context-aware of qmd vs. Rmd, which I think is doable. If/when we settle on terminology, we can open a corresponding issue at https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio as well.

[mcanouil]

Nice catch @mine-cetinkaya-rundel
In Visual Studio Code, it is already inconsistent compared to RStudio, but consistent with the "cell" convention.

/ command	Insert	Format