Note
For Neovim users, this plugin is superseded by R.nvim. I no longer use Vim-R and will only fix newly reported bugs if they are serious enough to prevent its use. I will not fix minor bugs.
Vim-R improves Vim's support to edit R scripts.
Please, read sections Instalation and Use of the documentation.
The diagram below shows how the communication between Vim and R works.
The black arrows represent all commands that you trigger in the editor and that you can see being pasted into R Console. There are three different ways of sending the commands to R Console:
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When running R in a Vim built-in terminal, the function
chansend()is used to send code to R Console. -
When running R in an external terminal emulator, Tmux is used to send commands to R Console.
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On the Windows operating system, Vim-R can send a message to R (vimcom) which forwards the command to R Console.
The R package vimcom includes the application vimrserver which is never used by R itself, but is run as a Vim's job. That is, the communication between the vimrserver and Vim is through the vimrserver standard input and output (green arrows). The vimrserver application runs a TCP server. When vimcom is loaded, it immediately starts a TCP client that connects to vimrserver (red arrows).
Some commands that you trigger are not pasted into R Console and do not output
anything in R Console; their results are seen in the editor itself. These are
the commands to do omnicompletion (of names of objects and function
arguments), start and manipulate the Object Browser (\ro, \r= and \r-),
call R help (\rh or :Rhelp), insert the output of an R command
(:Rinsert) and format selected text (:Rformat).
When new objects are created or new libraries are loaded, vimcom sends messages that tell the editor to update the Object Browser, update the syntax highlight to include newly loaded libraries and open the PDF output after knitting an Rnoweb file and compiling the LaTeX result. Most of the information is transmitted through the TCP connection to the vimrserver, but temporary files are used in a few cases.
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languageserver: a language server for R.
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colorout: a package to colorize R's output.