I am new to R and am trying to set up a minimal R development environment on my machine. I want to set up an auto-formatter for R code which formats my code upon save (Like prettier, ruff or rustfmt).
After looking into the problem it seems like styler and formatR packages seem to do what I want, but these offer API's to format files from R code using functions. What I want is a command line tool (like ruff or rustfmt) with which I can set up a hook to format my files on save from my editor (Neovim and Helix). However upon going through the documentation of the libraries, neither seem to provide a command line utility.
effectively what I want is to run the following from a terminal:
toolname Rfile.R
and get the formatted version of RFile.R.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can go about this? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Create a file rformat and make it executable.
#!/bin/sh
Rscript -e "styler::style_file('$1')"
give it execute permission:
chmod +x rformat
format files with it:
./rformat my_script.R
Or use styleR -> install.packages("styler")
Save the following script as format.R:
#!/usr/bin/env Rscript
args <- commandArgs(trailingOnly = TRUE)
if (length(args) != 1) {
stop("Usage: format.R <file>")
}
file_path <- args[1]
if (!file.exists(file_path)) {
stop("File does not exist: ", file_path)
}
library(styler)
style_file(file_path)
make it executable again
chmod +x format.R
and run
./format.R path/to/your/file.R
To integrate this with Neovim, you can set up an autocommand to run the script whenever you save an R file. Add the following to your Neovim configuration init.vim:
autocmd BufWritePost *.R silent !./path/to/format.R %
It also depends on your IDE. The easiest for me is to use RStudio, mark everything (Ctrl + A) and autoformat everything (Ctrl + Shift + A). It takes 2 seconds and is super easy. You could maybe even mingle with your .rProfile file and change the .last function to autoformat all code in the directory.