Auto-completion in Notepad++ for R Script

Yihui Xie

12 years ago

[This article was first published on Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun » R Language, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)

Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Update: now the long hints for function parameters can be broken into several shorter lines.

Auto-completion is fancy in a text editor. Notepad++ does not support auto-completion for the R language, so I spent a couple of hours on creating such an XML file to support R:

Download: R.xml (938Kb)

Put it under ‘plugins/APIs‘ in the installation directory of Notepad++ (you can see several other XML files there supporting different languages such as C), and make sure you have enabled auto-completion in Notepad++ (Settings --> Preferences --> Backup/Auto-completion). Open an R script and start typing a familiar function (e.g. paste()), you will see some candidates in a drop-down list like this:

Show parameters of R functions in Notepad++

Hit the Enter key if the function name selected in the list is correct for you, then type ‘(‘ and you will see hints for parameters:

Auto-completion in Notepad++ for R script

The file R.xml was actually generated from R; it contains almost all visible R objects in base R packages as well as recommended packages like MASS. You may create an extended XML file (containing keywords from other packages) by yourself after loading the packages you need into your current workspace, and run:

source('http://yihui.name/en/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Npp_R_Auto_Completion.r')
# R.xml will be generated under your current work directory: getwd()

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun » R Language.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.

Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Related Posts