Getting Started with R Programming

1. Installing R

Step 01: Install R-Binaries from R-Project

Step 02: Install RStudio IDE from RStudio

2. Customizing RStudio

A lot of ways you can make RStudio more useful for your personal use. Like updating your ‘.RProfile’, adding an awesome theme, and fonts that support ligatures.

• Using Rstudio as R-IDE: R studio has multiple windows but the most important are Code editor, console, Environment variable pane, and plot output pane.

Figure 1: R-Studio IDE have many pans.

• Code editor: You will write your code in this window. R used # as the comment character. To assign a variable to a value we use ← (lowercase followed by a dash).

2.1 Customize R startup with “.Rprofile”

If you are using a Windows machine you can find the location of your ‘.Rprofile’ at ‘C:/Users/UserName/Documents’. The code block is shown below. This is what my ‘.Rprofile’ looks like. Several costume functions can be added here and they will load with R startup every time.

cat("\014")
cat("Hi Ankit! What are we doing today?\n")

Figure 2: A RStudio window

2.2 Adding a theme

I personally like the dark theme for my R studio. I particularly like to use the ‘Gruvbox’ theme that is not available in RStudio but can be downloaded from here. Download the file and paste it to 'C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\RStudio\themes'. To apply the theme in R studio go to Tools > Global Option > Appearance and select editor theme as gruvbox.

Figure 3: RSudio configuration windows

2.3 Adding fonts that support ligature

This helps to read and understand code faster and efficiently, mostly the merged common occurring 2 characters to one for easy reading but this is just a font rendering feature it means the underlying code remains ASCII-compatible [Source].

Figure 4: Font Ligature makes code more asthetic pleasing and readable

Fira Code is a free monospaced font containing ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations.

Figure 5: Fira Font with different themes

Download and FiraCode font from Here, and Install on your machine for all users. To apply the theme in R studio go to Tools > Global Option > Appearance and select editor font as Fira Code.

3. Customize R with code snippets

The snippet is a re-usable piece of code or text. Ordinarily, these are formally defined operative units to incorporate into larger programming modules. To repeat a few operations and formats you can use snippets in R. To edit or add snippets in RStudio go to Tools > Global Option > Code > Editing, now enable Snippets and click edit snippets.

Figure 6: R Snippets for quick code chunks.

From the edit snippets window you can manage snippets of R. Mostly I use R and R markdown snippets in my daily use. Few useful snippets are:

snippet cls
  graphics.off(); rm(list = ls()); cat("\014")

snippet rqr
  if(!require(${1:packageName})){install.packages("${1:packageName}");
  library(${1:packageName})}

snippet fmt
	# Title       :: ${1:File Title}------------------------------------------------
	# Author      :: Ankit Deshmukh
	# DOC         :: `r eval(Sys.Date())`
	# DOLE        :: `r eval(Sys.time())`
	# Description :: ${2:File Description}
	
	# setup ------------------------------------------------------------------------
	graphics.off(); cat("\014")
	setwd("`r eval(getwd())`")
	
	# libraries --------------------------------------------------------------------
	library(tidyverse)

	# code -------------------------------------------------------------------------

snippet pp
  "`r gsub("\\\\", "/", readClipboard())`"

snippet clear
  rm(list = ls()); graphics.off();cat("\014")

To use the snippet use the keywords such as clear and press Shift + Tab to auto complete the snippet text.