Feature idea: "Start R Project Here"

I know there are probably a million and one ideas that the R Studio IDE team have in development already, but something that I would use is an option within a folder in Windows Explorer that would create a .Rproj file within that folder.

Below is an image of a similar feature that the git shell has, which starts a terminal at the specific location. I think it would be useful because I am often downloading or otherwise pulling a bunch of data into a file, and then having to start R Studio, selecting "Start a new Project at existing directory", and then navigating back to the folder. Having the option to start the .Rproj file from windows explorer and then being able to double-click to go directly to that project would be very nice.

Is that just me, or does anybody else think this is a good idea?

image

4 Likes

I wrote a shell script that can do this from the command line. I suppose you could do this from the terminal pane in the new RStudio. Just run it in the directory where you want to create an R Project.

#!/bin/sh

# Writes a standard Rproj file to workingDirName.Rproj

PROJFILE="$(basename "$(pwd)").Rproj"

cat > $PROJFILE << EOF
Version: 1.0
RestoreWorkspace: Default
SaveWorkspace: Default
AlwaysSaveHistory: Default
EnableCodeIndexing: Yes
UseSpacesForTab: Yes
NumSpacesForTab: 2
Encoding: UTF-8
RnwWeave: Sweave
LaTeX: pdfLaTeX
AutoAppendNewline: Yes
StripTrailingWhitespace: Yes
EOF

echo "Created new project file: $PROJFILE"
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I made an R package to does something similar on windows, except it's "open Rstudio here".