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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.

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    Have you tried putting the autoformatter code into a file and running it using Rscript? stackoverflow.com/questions/28543490/…. If you're on a Unix machine you can add a shebang and make the R-file executable as well. Commented Feb 4 at 16:54
  • @AkselA No I haven't. This feels like a workaround. I was hoping to see if there was a more straight forward or standard solution. If not, I'll be sure to try this out. Commented Feb 4 at 16:57
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    You can find existing 3rd party integration implementations through styler.r-lib.org/articles/third-party-integrations.html (gh actions, ale plugin for vim, emacs formatter, ...) Commented Feb 4 at 17:05
  • The integrations look like a good option, the R language server option might make it convenient to use from my editors. I will look into them. Thanks. Commented Feb 4 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

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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.

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1 Comment

Hi thank you for the elaborate answer. This saves me a lot of legwork. This was what I was averse to doing as it seemed like a workaround, but as of now this seems to be the best option. I will accept your answer for now and update if I find a better solution.

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