Make RStudio default software for opening data files (CSV/json etc.)

[msj]

Issue

I want to minimise the time it takes me to go from a random csv file to a quick couple of ggplots and summarise tables. It's currently really fast to just open in Excel and create a chart but it doesn't have to be that way.

What I'd like for a CSV

The ability to set RStudio as the standard software for opening a csv. Then, when I open a file, RStudio opens, pulls the csv data into a dataframe and puts dplyr and ggplot2 in my library. That's it. Now I can start looking at the data however I would like.

Nice to have for all data files

If I could define my own script for the "open file" action that would be even better. I could decide that I want to add a different package that's useful for my specific function (e.g. I might always want some GIS functions for opening a particular file, but not everybody would)

[Peter_Griffin]

This is more a system question than a rstudio question

[mara]

@msj

The ability to set RStudio as the standard software for opening a csv.

On a Mac you'd right-click a .csv file and select Get Info. From there you can change what application you want to use to open a file. In Choose Application, you'll have to change the dropdown "Enable All Applications", and then you can select RStudio (step by step instructions here.

Windows setup here

Windows 10: Change the Default Programs for Opening Files

However, the above would just open the csv as a text file in RStudio, it wouldn't automatically import it.

@msj

If I could define my own script for the "open file" action that would be even better.

I think there are ways of doing this, but it depends more on your system setup than RStudio itself.

You could probably make a shell script that launches RStudio and passes a file into a script (e.g. read.csv("<-path to file here->") — not actual code, that's just the idea).

On a Mac (which is what I'm on), you can use an application called Alfred to do "open file actions"
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/actions/open-file/

I'm pretty sure you can do the same thing using Mac Automator workflows, where you're, in essence, saying "when I do this, open this application, and use the selected file as a variable in this script that I want to run"

Learn to Use Mac Automator With 6 Handy Example Workflows

re. launching RStudio projects from the command line see here

Launch multiple RStudio projects from the command line

I want to create an alias in my .bashrc file, so that I can easily launch a few current projects at once. My attempts look like: rstudio ~/projects/proj1/proj1.Rproj & \ rstudio ~/projects/proj2/proj2.Rproj & which does something surprising to me: it launches proj1 twice, and both RStudio instances seem to share the same R session, with their consoles synced. My questions are: any idea what is happening? how can I achieve my goal (launch multiple projects at once)?