Editor setup

Air provides excellent support for code editors that support the Language Server Protocol. Many do, including Positron, VS Code, and Zed. Air also provides some support for code editors that allow for external formatters, such as RStudio.

VS Code

Our VS Code extension does not yet bundle the Air binary, so the first thing you need to do is install the Air binary. After you install the Air binary, the extension will automatically find it.

We don’t currently have a VS Code Extension on the marketplace yet, but we do build them as artifacts on each commit. The short-term way to install the extension is to open this link in your browser, which will download a zip folder containing the extension as a vsix file:

https://github.com/posit-dev/air/actions/runs/12417189172/artifacts/2344425762

After downloading the extension, open VS Code, navigate to the Extensions pane, and drag the vsix file into the Extensions pane and “drop” it in. VS Code will automatically recognize it and install the extension.

Format on save

Once you have the extension installed, turn on Format on Save for R documents by opening your settings.json and adding:

{
    "[r]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true
    }
}

You may also want to set Air as the default formatter for R documents if you have multiple R formatters installed. You can set that with "editor.defaultFormatter": "Posit.air".

You should now be able to simply open an R document, save it, and have the entire document formatted by Air. You can also explicitly call the command Format Document if you’d like to control this manually.

Format selection

To format a selection of code, highlight it with your cursor and run the command Format Selection. Formatting a selection may expand that selection to find the nearest complete fragment of code that is formattable.

Positron

Follow the instructions for VS Code.

Eventually the Air extension will be available on OpenVSX for easy use in Positron.

RStudio

As of RStudio 2024.12.0, there is experimental support for an “external formatter”.

RStudio does not bundle an Air binary, so the first thing you need to do is install the Air binary.

Open Tools -> Global Options -> Code and change the option to use an External formatter. Then set the Reformat command to path/to/air format.

The easiest way to figure out path/to/air for yourself is to run which air from a Terminal on Mac or Linux, and where air from the Command Prompt on Windows.

Format on save

After you’ve set Air as an external formatter, you can either tell RStudio to format all documents on save, or set this on a per document basis.

To format all documents on save, open Tools -> Global Options -> Code -> Saving and check Reformat documents on save.

To format individual documents on save, open the file specific settings and check Reformat Document on Save.

Quarto

Quarto support currently only works in VS Code.

There is an issue in VS Code itself that currently prevents it from working correctly in Positron, we will fix this in Positron soon.

There is currently no way to use Air in RStudio with Quarto documents.

Format on save

To format all R code cells on save, set this in your settings.json:

{
    "[quarto]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true
    },
    "[r]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true
    }
}

Format cell

When inside an R cell in a Quarto document, use the chorded key combination Cmd+K Cmd+F or the command Quarto: Format Cell to format a single cell.