Add a quarto format command integrated with air format

[maikol-solis]

Description

Hey everyone,

A few days back, I asked about using the formatter with Quarto files in the air repo. The response was that Quarto should handle formatting on its own.

Thus, I imagine a new option format which is called like this:

$ quarto format file.qmd

And behind the scenes, it uses air format on every code chunk.

There's a similar idea for python chunks with the black-formatter project.

What do you think?

Best.

[mcanouil]

Formatting is usually the job of the IDEs or formatters.

The Quarto VSCode extension handles formatting with your default formatters (see for example the discussion about setting air as default formatter for VSCode).
If you change your formatter inside Positron/VSCode/Codium, you should be able to format with whatever you want, including air.
A VSCode extension can embed the tool as autopep8 or black.
In the case of R, the default formatter is usually styler which is used by the R extension for VSCode.

You could also use the exact same approach as the Quarto extension you mentioned which formats at render time.

This being said, I doubt the team will implement such formatter inside Quarto, because there are a lot of formatters and Quarto is language agnostic, so if it includes an opinionated formatter for one language, then it will "have to" to do it for all other languages and maintain those extra dependencies which will be very impractical and very time consuming.