vim-plug and Nvim-R

We can install a plugin manager to help install and manage Nvim-R and other Neovim extensions: vim-plug by Junegunn Choi.

Having installed Neovim, you can get vim-plug by running this via Terminal:

sh -c 'curl -fLo "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}"/nvim/site/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
       https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim'

You specify your plugins in a special init.vim file. Run the following line to create the file and open it in Neovim in the Terminal so you can begin editing:

nvim ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

You can then toggle into Neovim’s ‘insert’ mode (press i) and paste (ctrl + shift + V) this in:

" Specify a directory for plugins
" - Avoid using standard Vim directory names like 'plugin'
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

" List of plugins.
" Make sure you use single quotes

" Shorthand notation
Plug 'jalvesaq/Nvim-R', {'branch': 'stable'}

" Initialize plugin system
call plug#end()

Where Plug 'jalvesaq/Nvim-R' is the part where the Nvim-R plugin is specified.

This is a super minimal init.vim example. You can add a whole bunch of other plugins to this list that will allow for things like code autocompletion and themes. You can also add lines to this file to modify various settings within Neovim.

Enter ‘normal’ mode (press Esc) and then type the following and hit Enter:

:PluginInstall

This triggers the installation of the plugins you specified in the init.vim file. For me, this installed the latest Nvim-R version, 0.9.14.

I found a YouTube video and a GitHub gist by Rohit Farmer really useful for doing these steps. Rohit provides some good examples of additional plugins that will improve your experience of Nvim-R.

Using Nvim-R

A full run-through of how to use Neovim and Nvim-R are out of scope for this post, but it’s worth a quick aside here.

To open an .R or .Rmd script for editing in Nvim-R, you can:

• type nvim and the path to your file, like nvim ~/path/to/file.R, from a Terminal
• right-click the file in the explorer and select ‘Nvim-R’, which will open that file in Nvim-R in a Terminal window

The important thing to know is that Neovim and Nvim-R are keyboard-driven; there’s no pointing-and-clicking like in RStudio. You’ll need to remember a bunch of non-obvious key presses to get around, although these are all configurable.

See Neovim’s docs for its key bindings (i.e. key presses that result in something happening), but here’s some useful ones:

• i to enter ‘insert’ mode and begin typing text
• Esc to exit insert mode and enter ‘normal’ mode
• :w and Enter to write (save)
• :q and Enter to quit (the most searched-for command in history?) or :q! to quit without saving
• :wq and Enter to save and quit
• ^W and one of l, k, j or h to move focus around the ‘panes’ (e.g. script to console)

As for Nvim-R, see Section 4 of the docs for a full set of key bindings. Here’s some important default ones:

• \rf opens a console
• \l sends the current line to the console
• \cc to send the current R Markdown chunk
• \ro to open and close the object browser