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rstudiovim

Configure RStudio Vim key bindings ⌨️

RStudio supports Vim key bindings in the source editor, but doesn’t support a Vim config. {rstudiovim} offers a 🪟 Windows-only workaround by reading Vim commands from a file and simulating key presses to execute them on your behalf.

Ok, slow down a moment. If you’re here, you should probably be seriously considering using a different editor, with more comprehensive and configurable Vim features. Perhaps check out Neovim with R.nvim or quarto-nvim. To be clear, this package is not a neat RStudio API integration with its Vim mode, there is no such option. This is just: you list what buttons you want pressed; the buttons are pressed automatically for you. Nonetheless, it kind of works, so you are welcome to go crazy with me…

Overview

Install and load the package:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("davidfoord1/rstudiovim")
# load and attach:
library(rstudiovim)

Create and edit a config file (.vimrc) with a Vim command on each line. Edit at the suggested path:

Use Vim commands like map, imap, nmap and their noremap variants in the file to create new key bindings. Each command must be on its own line. You can add comment lines by preceding them with double quotes " like so:

" home-row exit from insert mode
imap jk <Esc>

You can then execute all the commands in the file with one function call and they will persist for the RStudio session. Then you execute these commands at the start of every RStudio session with the following in your .Rprofile:

if (interactive())  {
  rstudiovim::rsvim_exec_file(rprofile = TRUE)
}

Config in the cloud ☁️

The rsvim_exec_file() points by default to the rsvim_default_path() path, but you can use any text file or connection object containing your Vim commands. For instance you can use a web location to easily share the config between machines, like this to execute the example basic vimrc:

rsvim_exec_file("https://raw.github.com/davidfoord1/rstudiovim/main/inst/basic.vimrc")

Conditions for success. 📃

  1. You’re using RStudio on Windows.
  2. Setting Keybinding set for editor must be Vim (of course!).
  3. A file must be open in the source editor, so that you could execute Vim commands if you navigated to source yourself. It must be a file tab at the front, not a non-file tab like a View() pane.
  4. Don’t give inputs while the button presses are being executed as you can interrupt it.

See vignette("rstudiovim") for a more detailed introduction.