5 second delay when rendering Quarto in VSCode with conda environment

[battaglia01]

Bug description

When opening a .qmd file and rendering in VSCode with a conda environment, the terminal opens up, idles for 5 seconds, and then finally renders the page. If I press a key in the terminal it loads faster, but otherwise it waits 5 seconds. The problem is in this code:

quarto/apps/vscode/src/core/terminal.ts

Line 138 in 5224848

// risk of undue delay b/c the state.isInteractedWith bit will

The problem here is reflected in the comment

"note that we can do this without risk of undue delay b/c the state.isInteractedWith bit will flip as soon as the environment has been activated"

This is wrong - it is not how it really works. Instead, in VSCode, the terminal opens up immediately, but it waits for me to press a key before doing anything. I would imagine that state.isInteractedWith is not actually set until a user gesture such as a keypress happens after the terminal is opened.

In fact, if I do press anything and interact with the terminal, this breaks a different way. For instance, if I press the letter "x", it prepends it to the beginning of the command:

(core) [b] mike:~$ xquarto preview "/Users/mike/test.qmd" --no-browser --no-watch-inputs
bash: xquarto: command not found 

I have the same problem regardless of if python-envs.terminal.autoActivationType is set to shellStartup or command in the settings.json.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but FWIW just changing this to 100ms instead of 5s has been alright on my end. There may be a better answer.

Steps to reproduce

Open a .qmd file and render it, such as by clicking the "Preview" button.

Actual behavior

It waits five seconds before doing anything. If I press any key in the meanwhile, it then runs right away, but with my key prepended to the quarto command.

Expected behavior

It should just run the quarto render command immediately, without waiting for a keypress or 5 seconds to elapse.

Your environment

VSCode

Version: 1.116.0 (Universal)
Commit: 560a9dba96f961efea7b1612916f89e5d5d4d679
Date: 2026-04-15T00:28:13Z
Electron: 39.8.7
ElectronBuildId: 13797146
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 23.5.0

Quarto Extension

Installation Identifier: quarto.quarto
Version: 1.131.0
Last Updated: 1 day ago
Size: 30.55MB

[cscheid]

Thanks for the report. We're looking into this - it looks like VS code recently changed their terminal's behavior in the presence of venvs and other python environments.

It should just run the quarto render command immediately, without waiting for a keypress or 5 seconds to elapse.

Unfortunately this isn't safe to do; VS code will 100% issue commands on an open terminal after some period of time.

[battaglia01]

@cscheid As one simple idea - could you just make it so that the user can adjust the 5 seconds as a user setting? 100ms is sufficient on my system, and if for whatever reason I needed it to be longer I'd just make it longer.

[cscheid]

I think we could make this work with a configuration setting, yes. We're taking a look at this in the next week or so because of a related problem, and this might be a good escape hatch to have around in general.

[cscheid]

(@vezwork this might be something for us to add when we have that venv fix we discussed.)