Reset state command

[austin3dickey]

As a Positron developer, I frequently want to blow away all state, except it's nice to keep a handful of desired settings around. I currently run a bash script when I need to do this. If it's possible, perhaps we should add a command instead?

For safety, we could bring up an "are you sure"-type dialog box. We could also include options like "keep settings", "keep keybindings", etc.

Users may find this helpful in rare troubleshooting cases too.

[juliasilge]

It might be difficult to do a true reset of all state when Positron is running, because of what is stored in memory.

[rodrigosf672]

@austin3dickey Also found this to be cumbersome and logged #9237 (closed as duplicate). Thanks @jennybc !

I even naïvely deleted and re-downloaded Positron, hoping that it'd reset. Then, upon checking docs, I found this here.

I used the following command (Mac)
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Positron
and I got back to the default state I wanted.

So if there is a desire to reset panes back to default state, user would have to run this (or Windows equivalent). I'd second the idea of a button (that runs the command?) and confirmation from the user. At least for resetting the panes, that would be super helpful. cc @juliasilge

[jennybc]

This would be very helpful. In the spirit of enumerating workarounds similar to @austin3dickey's bash script, I actually keep my user-level settings.json and keybindings.json elsewhere (in a personal git repo of lots of dotfiles) and symlink them into position. Now, that has other benefits, but one important one is that I can blow away state and get my settings and keybindings back without too much pain.

But it would be really nice if this "just worked" better for everyone.

[juliasilge]

It will be difficult to build such a command that can be run while Positron is open FWIW; you really need Positron closed to be able to reset all its state.

[austin3dickey]

I wonder if we could overload the positron CLI to take a --reset-state flag.