[Developer Issue]: Set up Air in VS Code and remove the instructions for using {styler}

[Bai-Li-NOAA]

Description

@awilnoaa and I noticed that {styler} does not indent function argument names with a single indent (two spaces), it uses two indents instead (see comments here). Air formats the code correctly according to the {tidyverse} style guide.

We could consider setting up Air in VS Code by modifying .vscode/settings.json following the instructions here. This would allow automatic formatting on the fly. We need to use the command Air: Initialize Workspace Folder to format all R files at once. With this setup, we could remove the instructions for using styler::style_pkg() from the codebase (e.g., CONTRIBUTING.md).

[iantaylor-NOAA]

I'm in favor of moving from styler to Air for all of FIMS. The only issue I've had with Air was from trying the optional "format on save" option https://posit-dev.github.io/air/editor-vscode.html#editor-vs-code-format-on-save which makes it easy to mess up formatting when working on projects that haven't yet adopted Air styling.

[Bai-Li-NOAA]

@iantaylor-NOAA Good point! I’ve run into this too. Maybe we can move those settings into the project-specific settings.json instead of the global User settings.json file.

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

Recently, in the newsletter from Ropensci there was guidance about how to ignore certain commits in a git blame situation that include changes to styling.

A Git trick: keeping Git blame informative
If you reformat your whole codebase with Air, you’ll end up with one or several commits that only change the aspect of your code. A good code style is tantamount to readability, but when you’re exploring the history through Git blame, that commit or those commits are not relevant. This problem is solvable! Thanks to Hugo Gruson to telling us this: you can create (and .Rbuildignore) a file called .git-blame-ignore-revs where you list the hashes of the commits you want to exclude from Git blame.

Example in testthat:

# This file lists revisions of large-scale formatting/style changes so that
# they can be excluded from git blame results.
#
# To set this file as the default ignore file for git blame, run:
# $ git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs

# https://github.com/r-lib/testthat/pull/212113d17788e5d3a54fa83beed25e325703608f8b9f

To use this file,

you tell your local Git about it by running git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs

GitHub, on the other hand, automatically picks it up!

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

The Ropensci newsletter highlighted a blog post on using air and other tools like {jarl}. Even though there are multiple ideas here, the main focus is that we need to move to using air. We have an open PR that needs to be rebased to the current dev and finished.

[kellijohnson-NOAA]

The PR for this has been started but more will need accomplished. The plan is to implement air just prior to releasing version 1.0.