Simpler setup?
I teach Python+pandas, and as of this semester am having my students install and enable it. We/I ran into some issues doing so, mainly that a lot of configuration is needed to get format-on-save working. My students are relatively new to coding, so getting them to understand what was going on in the Settings JSON was a hurdle. I'd love to reduce the friction for them and other newbies (and everyone, really).
My assumption is that most people who install this extension would want the following enabled by default for both Python files and notebooks:
- Ruff to be set as the Python formatter
- Format on save to be enabled
- Import sorting enabled
Therefore, my suggestion is to consider either:
- Changing those settings by default, assuming that's possible or broadly desirable
- Giving a button for "want us to set this up for you?"
Granted, this could be a newbie bias and the more conservative approach makes sense for the majority of users. Just throwing this perspective out there.
Thanks!
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not that familiar with the capabilities we have in VS Code, but I kind of like the idea of a one-time prompt to enable more aggressive defaults. That seems a bit safer to me than changing the defaults outright.
I thought I had seen a similar idea in either the Ruff or ty issue trackers, but I couldn't find it again.
I think profiles might be a good way to handle this. I saw that github-mcp-server has a cool link/badge with this format:
'https://insiders.vscode.dev/redirect/mcp/install?name=github&config={"type": "http","url": "https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/"}'
but I think that's specific to MCP. Searching for docs on that led me to the profile link, though. I haven't tested it, but it sounds like you can export a profile as a GitHub gist and share a link to import it with your students.