R and Quarto Markdown Notebooks in VS code

I am looking for a general-purpose editor that can integrate and customize different features across all programming languages that I often use (e.g., R, Python, Julia and Javascript), and Visual Studio Code seems to be the best candidate for me. Here I will give a quick overview of the key features for deploying my R and quarto markdown notebooks in VS code. These settings can be easily generalized to other languages by adjusting the engines/compilers or adding the language-specific extensions.

Before I get started, it is necessary to install some extensions.

• R or vscode-R
• R LSP Client
• Markdown All in One
• multi-command

1. Install Radian Console

It is recommended to use the radian console as an alternative, since it supports rich syntax highlight for R script. You can directly install radian in your terminal via pip.

pip3 install -U radian
radian

With radian installed, you still need to specify the R path in your VS code settings. Just search for “r.path” in your settings (cmd + ,), and add the path (/usr/local/bin/radian) in specific cell. To see whether it works well, you can restart VS code and search for “create R terminal” in your command template (shift + cmd + p). You can also set a shortcut for this, as shown in the figure below.

Specify the path and keybinding for radian console

With the radian console, you always need to open an interactive R terminal via the shortcut (shift+cmd+r). For the sake of convenience, we can set the working directory at the current workspace so that it will take the source file location as the default working directory. You can set this by changing the terminal workspace as ${workspaceFolder}.

Set the working directory at the current workspace

It is important to know that radian is a python module, and you can specify a different version of python interpreter by directly modifying the radian script via (vim…