Any plans/timeline to change the default value of rstudio.keymap.enable from FALSE to TRUE?

[davidkane9]

I suspect that this is a tricky issue since other parts of the UI, especially in regard to future Positron Assistant usage, want to make use of the Command/Cntrl key. But, at the same time, those short cut keys work great, especially when working with R code/scripts interactively.

I don't know what the best answer is.

I would just like to know your current plans/thoughts so that I can prepare my students.

[jmcphers]

No, we do not plan to change this default. Statistically speaking (heh!) many more people have experience with VS Code than RStudio, so we think that VS Code style keybindings will be the most familiar to the average new user.

If you're finding that specific shortcuts you need are totally unbound (or prohibitively awkward) with the default keybindings, let us know! We'd like the default set to be ergonomic too.

[kv9898]

I wonder if Positron has statistics of whether more Positron users switched from VS Code or RStudio, though. It feels to me that the majority of Positron users have switched from RStudio and come from the R+Quarto/Rmarkdown+Shiny ecosystem. On the flip side, although more people use VS Code, only a small proportion of them are actually data scientists (many are web developers, for example) or target users of Positron.

[davidkane9]

Thanks. That seems sensible. Also, I had not realized that the default bindings include most/all of the shortcut keys which I care about, like Cmd-Return.

[jmcphers]

That's a good question! We don't really know since we don't collect this kind of data from our users. However, we posit (heh!) that early Positron users are much more likely to be RStudio users than later ones, since in the alpha/beta programs largely started with "friends of Posit" and it's been word of mouth from there (and thus biased towards the R/RStudio community). We expect however that later users are more likely to discover Positron from the VS Code side.