Interactive viewers

With R session watcher enabled, multiple types of viewers are supported to display tabular data, graphics, htmlwidgets and shiny apps.

Data viewer

View() will open a tab to view the object.

Object type	Viewer
data.frame	table viewer
matrix	table viewer
list	list viewer
environment	table viewer
others	text editor

And, Apache Arrow Table will be converted to a data.frame and then displayed in the table viewer.

Table viewer

The table viewer supports sorting and searching.

List viewer

The list viewer supports collapsing nodes.

Plot viewer

Graphics could be displayed in native X11/XQuartz window, or as a PNG file in VS Code window, or in a plot viewer based on httpgd device. For more details, go to https://github.com/REditorSupport/vscode-R/wiki/Plot-viewer.

Webpage viewer

In R, an htmlwidget is written in HTML and can be presented in a web browser. For example, the following image demonstrates an interactive graphics created by plotly:

Browser viewer

Interactive shiny apps can be displayed in VS Code. The following is an example created by

shiny::runExample("01_hello")

For security reasons, the VS Code WebView has security limitations on its capability of accessing external resources over a network. For more details, visit WebView API.

If you encounter a problem loading a webpage in a browser viewer, you may try viewing the web page in an external web browser.

Help viewer

The web pages in R documentation can be viewed in the help viewer. Syntax highlighting and link navigation are supported.

Help viewer could be revealed via ?symbol in R terminal, or from the Help pages viewer in the sidebar, or via command R: Open help for selection in either command palette or context menu in the editor.