What is the intended workflow with multifile projects and Quarto Preview?

[venpopov]

Description

I have seen many discussions around this and I remain confused. In RStudio the "render" button calls "quarto preview" for the document. In VSCode the quarto extension gives us a choice between Render Document and Preview. The preview is called with the specific file path, so I would expect it to run similarly to Render Document, except that it keeps a live server running and watches for changes.

The difficulty comes because quarto preview tries to render many documents in the project even on initial call. I understand that if you click in the previewed website on a like to another notebook it would make sense to render it. But I don't understand why it tries to render everything during the initial call. This often causes me headaches.

For example, I might often switch between local and remote work, syncing my github repostitory. I do that to run long-running notebooks with more resources and in parallel. I access the remote server with RStudio Server in a browser. When I do that, the only way to view the output of a notebook is to preview it within RStudio's window. But when I do that, it tries to render other notebooks that are currently running locally for example who are not yet cached and then I cannot see the single notebook I'm interested in because of this.

Or the reverse, if I want to use Render on Save function when I'm editing simple text parts of the website, while my notebooks are rendering in progress in different terminal sessions, the preview server tries to render them on it's own, even though I just want to preview a single document.

[mcanouil]

In your setup, I wouldn't use quarto preview.
I would use quarto render, freeze (and possibly cache), and a live http server to deploy the HTML file (there are extensions for that in VSCode/Positron, you can deploy one from Python, R, etc.).

The difficulty comes because quarto preview tries to render many documents in the project even on initial call

Without a concrete reproducible example, it's hard to help here.
If that's a website and documents were never generated, Quarto needs to build the website layout with the links. If you had a full render available (with freeze and/or cache), then it wouldn't be an issue.