REditorSupport / REditorSupport/vscode-R

Experience of RStudio User Trying to migrate

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feature-request stale
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
1.2k
Forks
139
Avg merge
2h 46m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

Description

I am a data scientist. I was recommended to try Visual Studio Code as a replacement for RStudio. I gave it a good shot but decided not to use it for the following reasons:

  1. I am used to RStudio Code Colouring and was not able to reproduce it in Visual Studio.
  2. Outline works only half the time and I couldn't find an option to just show a simplified version like in RStudio (only labels lines starting with # outside chunks.)
  3. Plots/Outputs do not show up inline in the R notebook like in Rstudio. There's no way to quickly copy a plot by right clicking.
  4. Variables did not show up. I could not double click variables (like a dataframe) to check its contents.

Overall, I think you should address these basic issues to make it easier to migrate from RStudio. It shouldn't be a matter of searching through this issue forum for 2hours+ to get these basic things to work.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by separating the four reported migration problems: R code colouring, outline behavior, inline R notebook plots and copying, and variable inspection. Reproduce each in Visual Studio Code with the R extension and define completion separately for each workflow; the issue names no files or tests to begin with.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
r, typescript, vscode
Domain
developer-experience, tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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