How to change cursor placement in Positron IDE?

Positron
1 
Positron Version: 2025.10.1 (system setup) build 4
Code - OSS Version: 1.103.0
Commit: b13dd1ca4803bc04a4a9165395b589b8caf4ab58
Date: 2025-10-14T22:13:39.363Z
Electron: 37.2.3
Chromium: 138.0.7204.100
Node.js: 22.17.0
V8: 13.8.500258-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

When working in Positron IDE inside a chunk of code using dplyr, the cursor seems to lose its intended placement (indented within the current block):

Positron_GIF

In this specific case, Co-pilot completes the code with the desired placement/format. How can I make this the default behavior?

2

The new modern language tooling that we've been building for Positron (new Jupyter kernel Ark, new formatter Air) have been built without a lot of support for this kind of "hanging" indentation. You can read a bit more about this in the Air context here:

If you are really committed to that hanging indentation, that might be a reason to stick with RStudio for now, because it does have formatting support for that style along with Enter behavior that is better for that style.

If you are interested in sticking with Positron, you would probably want to move over to a style like:

mtcars |> 
  mutate(
    wt_doubled = wt * 2,
    wt_tripled = wt * 3
  )
1 Like
3

Thanks as always, Julia!

This is perhaps a preference I got after using RStudio for so long. Adjusting the format to something like:

mydf <- 
  mtcars %>%
  mutate(
    "wt_doubled" = wt * 2,
    "wt_tripled" = wt * 3
  )

adds a non-trivial amount of bloat the the code when using many of these operations. I left a comment in the issues page but will continue with this style unless something changes.

I also thought it was interesting that co-pilot suggestions always use the hanging indent (as in the GIF), but maybe that's just due to it learning my own coding style (if that's a thing!)

Thanks again