New R project experience should use better default name

[JosiahParry]

Creating a new project there are two noticeable issues:

1. The color theme is ignored to some degree and the dark positron theme is used in some parts making it tough to read
2. The default name uses lower camel case which is not standard R style

[sharon-wang]

Thanks for taking the Project Wizard for a spin @JosiahParry!

I've opened https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/3799 to capture issue 1 more broadly across our modals/popups.

For issue 2, I'm curious about your thoughts on the following:

• Did you end up using "myRProject" as your project name, or did you end up typing something else?
• What format would have been more expected as the default project name? Maybe "myrproject" or "my-r-project"?
• What if the project name input was blank instead, so you'd need to type in a project name (no default)?
• Would a "randomly" generated project name serve your purposes?

[juliasilge]

Using lower camel case is really unusual for an R project. I would say let's switch to "my-r-project". 👍

[jonvanausdeln]

If the default project name changes, please check the new-project-wizard smoke tests. They will need to be changed to look for the new name.

[JosiahParry]

Sorry @sharon-wang ! I did not end up using the wizard's created name. I suspect I won't actually ever use it again since I'm more of a enter the terminal and:

mkdir my-r-project
cd my-r-project
positron . 

That said, there is an almost 0% chance that any project I make that uses R will have a lower-camel casing 😜

I thin my-r-project would be a good alternative!

[jennybc]

It's worth noting that my-r-project would not be a legal name for an R package (at least if you want to pass R CMD check). So if we're going to offer a default, we might want to consider that, in terms of digging a pit of success.

https://r-pkgs.org/workflow101.html#name-your-package

That being said, I think any use of the default name is basically by definition a toy experiment, because for real work, I'd expect the user to have a better name than our default.

[sharon-wang]

Thanks everyone for the feedback! It sounds like we're mainly in favour of my-r-project, so here's a summary of the implementation plan and some notes which may be helpful for https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/3364.

To Implement

• change the default R project name to my-r-project because lower camel casing (i.e. myRProject) is very atypical for an R project
• update the Project Wizard Smoke Tests to expect the new default R project name

Notes on UX

• users are likely to replace the default project name with something more relevant to what they are creating
• we could offer to generate a "random" project name for the user, but if the user typically opts to replace the default name anyways, implementing this may not have an outsized impact
• my-project-name would not be a valid name for an R Package, so we could align with R Package naming standards in case the user ends up turning the project into a package
  • We may support "R Package" in the Project Wizard in the future, so maybe it's okay to keep the project name default my-r-project and the default name for an R Package could be something like myrproject (we could also do some input validation to check if the package name is already taken on CRAN/Bioconductor)

[testlabauto]

Verified Fixed

Positron Version(s) : 2024.12.0-41
OS Version          : OSX

Test scenario(s)

Validated with automation against main on same day release was created.

Link(s) to TestRail test cases run or created: