Did you know that RStudio contains a lot of shortcuts to write code faster? Here are my favorites.
Currently working on my master’s thesis, I spend almost half on my day on R (the other half being spent reading articles). I have learnt a few very useful shortcuts by reading blog posts or free R books here and there and I have decided to make a small list of those I use most.
This combination will run all of your script, wherever the mouse is in the script. This considerably saves some time and is much more convenient than having to drag the mouse up to the “Run” button.
Almost all your work will have to be done again one day, either by you or by somebody else. That day, you will regret not having saved all the packages you needed in your R script. How is that possible? Well, it comes from the fact that I (and presumably other people too) load some packages and their dependencies in the same session because we test some packages, or because we are trying to solve a StackOverflow problem during a break, etc. Therefore, when you were writing it, some of your code was running only thanks to some packages you didn’t keep in your script.
To prevent this to happen again, you can run “Ctrl+Shift+F10” sometimes: it restarts the R session (but does not close RStudio) and allows to see quickly if your code can run all by itself. When I have finished writing a chunk of code, I always do “Ctrl+Shift+F10” and “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” to make sure that my code can run again in three months or more.
I do not use this everywhere but only in Markdown documents: it knits the document. As “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” replaces the “Run” button, “Ctrl+Shift+K” replaces the “Knit” button.
This is similar to “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” but it runs the script only until your mouse.
Indentation is quite important to have a code that is readable, especially when you begin to write more than 10 lines of code. Select your code (or just a piece of it) and do this combination to apply indentation rules automatically.
This creates a new section in your code, with the title you choose. Quite convenient to keep a readable code.
If you want to try a chunk of code quickly, you can run this combination to open a new file in RStudio.
To me, this is one of the most convenient shortcut. It simply allows to comment (and un-comment) at once all the lines selected.
The complete list of shortcuts is available in “Tools -> Keyboard Shortcuts Help” in RStudio. Other useful tools:
If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.
Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/etiennebacher/personal_website_distill, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Bacher (2020, April 6). Etienne Bacher: My favorite shortcuts in RStudio. Retrieved from https://www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2020-04-06-my-favorite-shortcuts/
BibTeX citation
@misc{bacher2020my,
author = {Bacher, Etienne},
title = {Etienne Bacher: My favorite shortcuts in RStudio},
url = {https://www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2020-04-06-my-favorite-shortcuts/},
year = {2020}
}