The daily build and rainbow parentheses

[andrewH]

I have always assumed that the daily builds of RStudio are for people who feel that they have more-or-less mastered the current stable version and wish to beta-test new features. That is not me, for the most part. I am not an especially hot programmer, and I have enough trouble keeping up with breaking changes in the tidyverse.

However, there is one feature in the daily builds that i want very badly: rainbow parenthesis matching. I have two questions about this.

First, am I being over-cautious about the daily builds? In particular, can I assume that if I am not trying to use new features introduced in the daily builds, I probably will not have any problems in moving from the stable version to the daily build version?

Second, and especially if the answer to the last question is yes, is there any way to turn on or install rainbow parenthesis matching in the stable version ? The instructions for turning on rainbow parentheses that I found say to check the box under Tools > Global Options > Code > Display, but there is no such box in the current stable build. I am hoping it has moved, or is a little more hidden, or otherwise available if I take the right steps. Is there such a way?

[jonathan]

We don't recommend using the daily builds to get access to new features -- they just aren't stable enough. However, we do release preview builds, which generally have the big features from the daily builds but don't update every day and are more stable. Our current preview build supports rainbow parentheses:

RStudio Preview

Rainbow parentheses are a new feature in RStudio 1.4 and there's no way to turn them on in the current stable release (1.3).

[andrewH]

Thanks, Jonathan! That's terrific.

For those who install the preview build, how would you recommend dealing with the usual updates? Just avoid them until 1.4 is released?

[MikeBess]

Previews are more stable than dailies, and we strive to make successive previews even more stable as we near release, so you're petty safe to take successive Preview updates. Also, we are very, very close to the 1.4 official release; our latest preview contains almost all fixes we're going to make for this release.