Frustrating behaviour of escaped ampersand within the visual editor

[KennethEnevoldsen]

(Not sure if this is the place to post this, do let me know if it is not)

First of all, I am a big fan of the visual editor in VS Code -- I have been using it for editing readmes for a while and I am currently writing my dissertation in it, I am very happy to see how well it scales and how little time I have to spend dealing with formatting as opposed to latex which I am much more familiar with.

However, one of the issues that I keep running into when writing is that when writing the @(ampersand) it is too often escaped leading me to have to open the file outside the visual editor, fix the escaped ampersand, and move back into the visual editor.

It seems like the rule is based somewhat on recent edits, but it seems too hard to inform the editor that "I do actually want to non-escaped @, please stop escaping it". When experimenting it seems like the intended behavior is when writing an ampersand starting out with @ then if you use a backspace escape it \@ and if you want the @ back then simply delete it completely and next time you write ampersand you will get the @. However, in some cases, I experience that I am locked into using escaped ampersands only.

edit: Attempted to capture this behavior here, to make it more clear:

Screen.Recording.2024-08-25.at.16.50.48.mov

edit2: in some cases it seems like it is impossible to produce the unescaped ampersand:

Screen.Recording.2024-08-25.at.17.05.51.mov

Checked the settings and I could not find anything that matches. I am using default setting on:

$quarto --version                                                                   
1.5.56

[cscheid]

(I'm not sure how much we can improve it, but this is the right place for the discussion/issue)

[KennethEnevoldsen]

but this is the right place for the discussion/issue

good to hear

I'm not sure how much we can improve it,

how come? Does it rely on a third-party dependency, or is the behavior as intended?