Getting started with R!

Getting started with R!

R is a very versatile statistical tool and programming language. It's my all-time good-to-go data analysis tool. It is fast, reliable and nifty. it provides great flexibility for my daily work and analysis tasks. If one uses R, they could consider Rstudio as a more sophisticated GUI than the Base R once.

1. Installing R

Step 01: Install R-Binaries from R-Project

Step 02: Install RStudio IDE from RStudio

2. Customizing RStudio

A lot of ways you can make RStudio more useful for your personal use. Like updating your '.RProfile', adding an awesome theme, and fonts that support ligatures.

2.1 Customize R startup with ".Rprofile"

If you are using a Windows machine you can find the location of your '.Rprofile' at 'C:/Users/UserName/Documents'. The code block is shown below. This is what my '.Rprofile' looks like.

 cat("\014")
 cat("Hi Ankit! What are we doing today?\n")

 

Several costume functions can be added here and they will load with R startup every time.

2.2 Adding a theme

I personally like the dark theme for my R studio. I particularly like to use the 'Gruvbox' theme that is not available in Rstudio but can be downloaded from here. Download the file and paste it to 'C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\RStudio\themes'. To apply the theme in R studio go to Tools > Global Option > Appearance and select editor theme as gruvbox.

2.3 Adding fonts that support ligature 

This helps to read and understand code faster and efficiently, mostly the merged common occurring 2 characters to one for easy reading but this is just a font rendering feature it means the underlying code remains ASCII-compatible [Source]. 

Fira Code is a free monospaced font containing ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. 

Download and FiraCode font from Here, and Install on your machine for all users. To apply the theme in R studio go to Tools > Global Option > Appearance and select editor font as Fira Code.

3. Customize R with code snippets

The snippet is a re-usable piece of code or text. Ordinarily, these are formally defined operative units to incorporate into larger programming modules. To repeat a few operations and formats you can use snippets in R. To edit or add snippets in RStudio go to Tools > Global Option > Code > Editing, now enable Snippets and click edit snippets. 

From the edit snippets window you can manage snippets of R. Mostly I use R and R markdown snippets in my daily use. Few useful snippets are:

snippet cls
  graphics.off(); rm(list = ls()); cat("\014") 

snippet rqr
  if(!require(${1:packageName})){install.packages("${1:packageName}");
  library(${1:packageName})} 

snippet fmt
  ## Title :: ${1:Title}
  # Author :: Ankit Deshmukh
  # DOC :: 2018${2:created}
  # DOLE :: 2018${3:lastEdited}
  # Remarks ::
  ##ClearUp and dir ####################################################
  graphics.off(); rm(list = ls()); cat("\014")
  setwd(${4:work directory})
  ## User packages #####################################################
  ## Main code #########################################################

snippet pp
  "`r gsub("\\\\", "/", readClipboard())`"

snippet clear
  rm(list = ls()); graphics.off();cat("\014")