rtichoke is an enhanced console to the R program. rtichoke is built on top of a python library prompt-toolkit. In certain sense, one would consider rtichoke as a ipython clone for R. rtichoke was previously named as rice.

rtichoke is still under active development, any feedbacks will be welcome. Users should also use it at their own risks

• shell mode (hit ; to enter and <backspace> to leave)
• lightweight, no compilation is required
• multiline editing
• syntax highlight
• auto completion
• auto matching parens/quotes.
• brackated paste mode
• cross platform, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux
• emacs/vi editing mode
• custom color scheme
• automiatically adjust to terminal width
• read more than 4096 bytes per line

Requirements:

• An installation of R (version 3.4.0 or above) is required to use rtichoke, an R installation binary for your system can be downloaded from https://cran.r-project.org.
• python is also required to install rtichoke. If your system doesn't come with a python distribution, it can be downloaded from https://conda.io/miniconda.html. Both version 2 and version 3 should work, though python 3 is recommended.
• pip is optional but it makes the installation a bit easier.

# install released version
pip install -U rtichoke
# or the development version
pip install -U git+https://github.com/randy3k/rtichoke
# to run rtichoke
rtichoke

rtichoke can be customized via options in .Rprofile file. This file is usually located in your user home directory.

options(
    # color scheme see [here](https://help.farbox.com/pygments.html) for a list of supported color schemes, default is `"native"`
    rtichoke.color_scheme = "native",

    # either  `"emacs"` (default) or `"vi"`.
    rtichoke.editing_mode = "emacs",

    # auto match brackets and quotes
    rtichoke.auto_match = FALSE,

    # auto indentation for new line and curly braces
    rtichoke.auto_indentation = TRUE,
    rtichoke.tab_size = 4,

    # pop up completion while typing
    rtichoke.complete_while_typing = TRUE,

    # automatically adjust R buffer size based on terminal width
    rtichoke.auto_width = TRUE,

    # insert new line between prompts
    rtichoke.insert_new_line = TRUE,

    # when using history search (ctrl-r/ctrl-s in emacs mode), do not show duplicate results
    rtichoke.history_search_no_duplicates = FALSE,

    # custom prompt for different modes
    rtichoke.prompt = "\033[0;34mr$>\033[0m ",
    rtichoke.shell_prompt = "\033[0;31m#!>\033[0m ",
    rtichoke.browse_prompt = "\033[0;33mBrowse[{}]>\033[0m ",

    # supress the loading message for reticulate
    rtichoke.suppress_reticulate_message = FALSE
)

You could alias r to rtichoke by putting

alias r="rtichoke"

in ~/.bash_profile such that r would open rtichoke and R would still open the tranditional R console. (R is still useful, e.g, running R CMD BUILD.)

If rtichoke cannot locate the installation of R automatically. The best option is to expose the R binary to the system PATH variable.

On Linux/macOS, you could also export the environment variable R_HOME. For example,

$ export R_HOME=/usr/local/lib/R
$ rtichoke

Note that it should be the path to R_HOME, not the path to the R binary. The folder should contain a file called COPYING. In some cases, you may need to futher specify LD_LIBRARY_PATH,

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:`R RHOME`/lib"
$ rtichoke

rtichoke maintains its own history file .rtichoke_history and doesn't use the .Rhistory file. A local .rtichoke_history is used if it is found in the launching directory. Otherwise, the global history file ~/.rtichoke_history would be used. To override the default behavior, you could launch rtichoke with the options: rtichoke --local-history, rtichoke --global-history or rtichoke --no-history.

rtichoke only provides a frontend to the R program, the actual running eventloop is the same as that of the traditional R console. There is no performance sacrifice (or gain) while using this modern command line interface.

Put

let R_app = "rtichoke"
let R_cmd = "R"
let R_hl_term = 0
let R_args = []  " if you had set any
let R_bracketed_paste = 1

in your vim config.

libreadline.so.6: undefined symbol: PC

If you are using conda and encounter this error, it is likely because the readline from conda is bugged. Install it again via conda-forge.

conda install -c conda-forge readline=6.2

The name rtichoke was suggested by thefringthing.