Making the console output visually structured - styling inputs and outputs

[lionel-]

I find it hard to visually parse the console output because inputs and outputs are styled exactly the same way. If we had a slightly different colour, or maybe bold inputs, and a bit of spacing between the end of an output and the next input (ideally this styling would be user-configurable), it would be easier to distinguish units of work in the console. The following should feel less like a wall of text and more like structured text:

The warp project takes this idea quite fare by splitting the output in "blocks": https://www.warp.dev. IIRC our treatment of errors is inspired by this idea and indeed the red box improves the structure of the output, though it still feels like the red box sticks equally to the text preceding it as to the text following it because of the lack of spacing:

Relatedly, it would be very helpful to have navigation commands across inputs in the console to make it easy to go back in the console history and inspect previous outputs.

[seeM]

+1 to styling! Could you please share more about "navigation commands across inputs in the console to make it easy to go back in the console history and inspect previous outputs"?

[lionel-]

It would be like a scrolling command that goes up to the previous input, or down to the next (until the currently active input prompt is reached). This could be triggered via a shortcut or arrows in the console toolbar. When an input is reached in this way, it would be nice to have access to further commands to copy the input or corresponding output to the clipboard. I think this would require making input items focusable?

[turbanisch]

I personally don't care so much about highlighted blocks but different colors for code and output in the console would be tremendously helpful. RStudio still has the edge here:

RStudio:

Positron:

[juliasilge]

If we used syntax highlighting on completed code as described in #243 that would get us some of the way there, at least to something as good as RStudio. It would not get us to the richer, Warp-style block treatment.

[juliasilge]

In #4470 (reply in thread), we have some additional thoughts on improving our console, motivated by folks' experience with the Jupyter interactive window. I'll highlight a few ideas:

• It could be useful to be able to expand/contract code sent to the console
• Folks like the timer feature from the Jupyter interactive window (counting up while running, showing the time when it's done)
• Maybe something similar to the Jupyter green check mark? I know we have the gutter green bar for code that is executed, but it actually shows green even for errors: