Installation: Windows

vscode-R

Install vscode-R in VS Code by searching reditorsupport.r in extension marketplace.

If your R installation is from CRAN with default installation settings, especially Save version number in registry is enabled, as the following image shows:

Then the default settings should work out of the box. Otherwise, you may have to change r.rterm.windows to the path to your R executable, which will be executed on command Create R Terminal.

languageserver

languageserver is an implementation of the Language Server Protocol for R.

Run the following commands in R.

You may install the latest stable release from CRAN:

install.packages("languageserver")

or install the development version with the newest features:

remotes::install_github("REditorSupport/languageserver")

which requires Rtools to build.

You can also install the rmarkdown package and Pandoc rendering library to see formatted R help pages upon hover. Previews of function documentation without these dependencies will show a plain page.

rmarkdown can be installed with:

install.packages("rmarkdown")

Pandoc is automatically installed if you have RStudio on your machine. See the official installation guide here if you do not have RStudio.

radian

radian is highly recommended as the R terminal for interactive use.

Since radian is built with python, we need to install python first. Note that radian does not work with the python distributed by Microsoft Store (radian#120) before v0.5.4, we need to install the official version. Go to Python Releases for Windows and download the latest executable installer, e.g. Windows x86-64 executable installer.

Make sure Add Python 3.x to PATH is selected.

Then start a command prompt or Windows PowerShell terminal and type the following command to install radian via pip:

pip install -U radian

To locate the path to radian.exe, run the following command:

where.exe radian

Then the following VS Code settings should be updated to properly use radian as the default terminal. Put the path to radian.exe in r.rterm.windows with all \ replaced with \\. For example, if your radian is installed for user:

{
  "r.bracketedPaste": true,
  "r.rterm.windows": "C:\\Users\\user\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python37\\Scripts\\radian.exe"
}

There is currently an issue with radian, so that it does not respect the "r.bracketedPaste". To fix this, simply add the following to your .Rprofile:

options(radian.auto_match = FALSE)
options(radian.auto_indentation = FALSE)
options(radian.complete_while_typing = FALSE)

radian.complete_while_typing should also be set to FALSE when sending a long function; otherwise, the code may hang for a few seconds at random points before continuing.

VSCode-R-Debugger

VSCode-R-Debugger is a VS Code extension that implements R debugging capabilities. It depends on vscDebugger.

1. Install VSCode-R-Debugger extension in VS Code.
2. Install vscDebugger package via

remotes::install_github("ManuelHentschel/vscDebugger")

httpgd

httpgd is an R package to provide a graphics device that asynchronously serves SVG graphics via HTTP and WebSockets. It enables the plot viewer based on httpgd in VS Code.

1. Install httpgd from CRAN/r-universe

   install.packages("httpgd", repos = c("https://nx10.r-universe.dev", "https://cran.r-project.org"))

2. Enable r.plot.useHttpgd in VS Code settings.

3. Add the following code to your .Rprofile:

   if (interactive() && Sys.getenv("TERM_PROGRAM") == "vscode") {
     if ("httpgd" %in% .packages(all.available = TRUE)) {
       options(vsc.rstudioapi = TRUE)
       options(vsc.use_httpgd = TRUE)
       options(vsc.plot = FALSE)
       options(device = function(...) {
         httpgd::hgd(silent = FALSE)
       })
     }
   }

Troubleshooting WSL

The connection between VSCode and R may fail if an R session is started on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2), but VSCode is started outside of the WSL environment (e.g. on plain Windows). For R to work, you must open VSCode on WSL with the code <directory> command so that VSCode "thinks" that it is inside the container.

See issue #910 for details.