Recommended extensions and configuration

In addition to the setup detailed in the Getting Started page, or the configuration available in the settings page, users may be interested in further configuration to match the experience of other editors like RStudio. Many of these are features that vscode-R does not directly control, but are possible to handle through VSCode and the libraries vscode-R interfaces with. We suggest some of those options here.

Formatting

User's settings.json file in VSCode can be configured to format on save:

{
  "[r]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "REditorSupport.r",
    "editor.formatOnSave": true
  },
  "[rmd]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "REditorSupport.r",
    "editor.formatOnSave": true
  }
}

Linting

It's also useful to set some sensible defaults for the R linter. These can be configured in a .lintr file at your computer's HOME directory (or USERPROFILE if you are on Windows), or in your current project.

The following example allows commented code, which is often a necessity, and prevents checking if objects are in global scope, since this can throw extraneous errors if functions from libraries are called.

linters: with_defaults(
  object_usage_linter = NULL,
  commented_code_linter = NULL)

See the lintr docs for more configuration details and rules.

Dots in variable/function names

Treat names.like.this as one word for selection.

In VSCode's settings.json, add the following:

"[r]": {
    "editor.wordSeparators": "`~!@#%$^&*()-=+[{]}\\|;:'\",<>/?"
}

C/C++

We recommend the C/C++ VSCode extension with the following settings to write Rcpp:

In .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json:

{
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "Linux",
      "includePath": [
        "${workspaceFolder}/**",
        "${env:HOME}/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/Rcpp/include",
        "/usr/share/R/include"
      ],
      "defines": [],
      "compilerPath": "/usr/bin/gcc",
      "cStandard": "c11",
      "cppStandard": "c++17",
      "intelliSenseMode": "clang-x64"
    }
  ],
  "version": 4
}

.clang-format:

---
Language: Cpp
BasedOnStyle: LLVM
Standard: Cpp11
ReflowComments: false
---

In your settings.json:

"C_Cpp.commentContinuationPatterns": [
    "/**",
    "//'"
]

See demonstration and more tooling at renkun-ken/vscode-rcpp-demo

Path Autocomplete

We recommend the VSCode extension Path Autocomplete with the following configuration in settings.json to enable autocompletion for file names:

"path-autocomplete.pathMappings": {
    "/": "/",
    "./": "${folder}"
}

Error Lens

You can use the Error Lens extension for more visible error messages.