RStudio v0.93.73

New Features

Source editor enhancements

We’ve added some new features & options to the source editor. We’ve also received lots of feedback on more advanced capabilities users want in the editor and we will definitely address this in upcoming releases. New stuff in the editor includes:

  • Highlight all instances of selected text
  • Insert spaces for tabs (soft-tabs)
  • Customizable print margin line
  • Selected line highlight
  • Toggle line numbers on/off
  • Optional soft-wrapping for R source files

The docs on source code editing options include more details.

Customizable layout and appearance

One of the most frequently requested features we’ve have is the ability to put the Console and Source views side-by-side. This configuration (and others) are now possible. New appearance and layout options include:

  • Customize locations of panes and tabs
  • Change default font size for code views
  • Select from various editor themes including TextMate, Eclipse, and others.

For more details see the docs on appearance and layout options.

Interactive plotting (manipulate)

This release includes a package called manipulate that can be use to create interactive plots within RStudio. Manipulate is very flexible and includes the following capabilities:

  • Generate plots with inputs bound to custom controls (rather than being hard-coded to a single value)
  • Variety of control types including slider, picker, and checkbox.
  • Controls appear next to the plot and can be easily shown and hidden

More details as well as screenshots with examples can be found in the manipulate documentation.

Works with R installed from source

The first beta of RStudio was compatible with the binary version of R distributed from CRAN. The current release works with any version of R, including:

  • R built and installed from source using make install
  • MacPorts or Homebrew versions of R on MacOS X

The docs on using different versions of R describe how RStudio determines which R to run against on each platform.

Character encoding

In this release we’ve significantly improved handling of non-ASCII characters, this includes:

  • Unicode characters can be used for input and output in the console.
  • The source editor supports Unicode characters and can open/save files using any character encoding.
  • A product-wide default encoding can be set, and can be overridden on a per-document basis.

See the character encoding documentation for more details.

Improved management of working directories

We’ve added a number of new features to make it easier to switch between working contexts located in different directories. These include:

  • Option to specify a default initial working directory
  • Tools - Change Working Dir menu command to change both the working directory and Files pane.
  • Optional file associations for .RData and .R that initialize RStudio within the opened file’s directory
  • Windows: Startup in working directory specified for shortcuts
  • Mac: Startup in folder dragged and dropped on RStudio Dock icon
  • Linux: Startup in terminal working directory when run from the command line

The docs on working directories and workspaces go into more depth on these features.

Other Enhancements

Console

  • Recognize \r character in console so that txtProgressBar works as expected
  • Lift restrictions on size of console input which can be sent to R (was 4K total, is now 4K per line)
  • Jump to next non-blank line in source after executing via Ctrl-Enter

Source Editing

  • Improved size and legibility of default fonts on Windows & Linux

  • New keyboard shortcuts:

    • Alt- for inserting assignment (“<-") operator.
    • Ctrl+Shift+Home/End for select to start/end
    • Ctrl+Shift+P for Compile PDF

  • Add “return” to list of symbols syntax highlighted as a keyword

Compatibility

  • Compatible with R 2.11.1 on Mac (previously required R 2.12)

  • Added CFBundleSignature to Mac version

  • Correctly initialize memory.limit to available physical memory on 64-bit Windows

  • Ensure that R uses Internet2 on Windows for interoperability with proxy servers.

  • Compatibility with changes to the R 2.13 internal web server (pass headers to custom handlers).

  • Allow RStudio desktop to run under root account

  • Improved support for openSUSE (still requires install from source):

    • Added install-dependencies-zypper script
    • Added init.d script for daemon management

Packaging and Installation

  • Added RStudio.version function to show current version of RStudio

  • Changed name of RStudio binary from rdesktop to rstudio (avoid conflict with existing rdesktop binary)

  • Added /usr/bin/rstudio soft-link

  • Change DEB and RPM dependency on base R package to “recommends” rather than “depends”

  • Made it more straightforward to install from source:

    • Eliminated git pull requirement (can now build directly from tarball)
    • Optionally use system package manager installed versions of Qt4 & Boost

Miscellaneous

  • Added Tools menu with Interrupt R, Change Working Dir, and Options commands.
  • Add support for loading .rda files into Workspace.
  • Improved file icons including new custom icons for Rnw and Rd files.
  • Respect both R_USER and HOME environment variables for determining location of R home directory
  • Render plot changes on calls to Sys.sleep (enables animated plots)
  • Workaround Ubuntu TeX ~ substitution bug by using pdflatex rather than texi2dvi

Bug Fixes

Console

  • Workspace restored message prints at startup even if no workspace was restored
  • Numeric keypad Enter and navigation keys not correctly interpreted by console
  • Esc key not always correctly interpreted when attempting to exit from incomplete command.

Source Editing

  • Source pane can become fully selected and impossible to unselect.
  • Control-Enter to execute sometimes results in selection not updating properly
  • Jump to Word (Ctrl+Right) doesn’t navigate past ‘[’ character.
  • Ctrl+Backspace doesn’t delete previous word on Windows
  • Characters illegible when Lucida Grande is installed on Mac systems
  • Active tab in source mode sometimes hidden or partially obscured
  • Control+S repeats last Undo/Redo on Firefox 3.6
  • Print from source view not working in Firefox 4
  • Eliminate key binding conflicts for international keyboard layouts
  • Incorrect shortcut key displayed in tooltip for Run from source commands
  • Variables with dots (".") in their names not highlighting on double-click.

Plotting

  • Graphics device not reselected after closing other device (e.g. pdf or png device)
  • X11 device and rgl package not working properly on on Mac.
  • Save as PNG command not working on Linux
  • Re-entrant plot rendering routine causes crash for plots which take a long time to be rendered.
  • plotmath expressions not rendered correctly
  • Plot history can grow arbitrarily large and cause disk/memory problems.

Compatibility

  • rJava package not working on Linux due to incomplete LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  • Not always correctly detecting whether TeX is installed
  • Dependency on psmisc package not specified for RStudio Server
  • Incorrect file association for download of RPM on Fedora

Miscellaneous

  • Failed to start when running behind some proxy server configurations.
  • Unable to initialize from .Rhistory file that is owned by root
  • Exit delay of 2-3 seconds in Mac version
  • Crash when custom gtk theme contains missing or invalid images for standard icons
  • Unresponsiveness when viewing extremely large data frames
  • Conflicting RStudio instances running in parallel if launched from different executable paths