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Positron, a next-generation data science IDE
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Variables Pane - enable multi-line summaries #2212

Open jgutman opened 7 months ago

jgutman commented 7 months ago

We have several issues, particularly on the Python side, that would benefit from multi-line summaries and there is some discussion indicating that this work was planned. This issue tracks the UI changes to enable language packs to contribute multi-line summaries in the variable pane. It's unclear to me whether having a number of children, each with their own single-line summary, is sufficient, or whether we'd actually want multi-line cells for a single row item/child

jmcphers commented 7 months ago

I think that multi-line summaries are independent from children -- a multi-line summary could be a list of children per line but not necessarily so; it could just be a textual summary of the contents (which could even be furnished in addition to the children in some contexts).

I think this would best be modeled as a new member of the Variable data structure, as a free text string that will be displayed in the Variables pane. If we wanted to get fancy we could allow ANSI escape sequences in it (although only for decorative purposes since we need to be sure any actually semantic information gets communicated in ways other than color).