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Installation

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James Eapen edited this page Mar 5, 2024 · 36 revisions

The installation process is described in four sections:

  1. Installation of dependencies
  2. Installation of the plugin
  3. Troubleshooting
  4. Optional steps

Installation of dependencies

Before installing the plugin, you should install its dependencies:

Main dependencies:

Notes about the R package nvimcom:

  • The R package nvimcom is included in Nvim-R and is automatically installed and updated whenever necessary. The package requires compilation by a C compiler (e.g. gcc or clang).

  • You do not need to load nvimcom in your .Rprofile because the Nvim-R plugin sets the environment variable R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES, including nvimcom in the list of packages to be loaded on R startup. However, if you set the option defaultPackages in a .Rprofile, you should include "nvimcom" among the packages to be loaded (see nvimcom-not-loaded).

  • On Windows, you have to install Rtools to be able to build the package: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/

Additional dependencies for editing Rnoweb documents:

  • latexmk: Automate the compilation of LaTeX documents. See examples in R_latexcmd.

  • PDF viewer with SyncTeX support and capable of automatically reloading documents. This is required only if you edit Rnoweb files.

    • On Linux and other Unix systems: Zathura (recommended), Evince or Okular.
    • On OS X: Skim.
    • On Windows: SumatraPDF.

Suggestions for Unix (Linux, OS X, Cygwin, etc.):

  • Tmux >= 3.0: Tmux is required only if you want to run R in an external terminal emulator (see R_external_term).

  • colorout: Colorizes the R output in terminal emulators. (Mostly useful if running R in an external terminal emulator. See R_external_term). You should put in your Rprofile: library(colorout)

If running Gnome Shell on Wayland, you may also want to install the extension "Activate Window By Title" which will be used to raise Zathura window displaying the PDF file generated from Rnoweb, Rmd or Quarto documents.

Suggestions for bibliographic completion from Zotero:

For RMarkdown (.Rmd) and Quarto (.qmd) documents:

Installation of the plugin

If you have a previous Vimball installation, you should uninstall it first:

:packadd vimball
:RmVimball Nvim-R

Either use a plugin manager to install Nvim-R or follow the instructions on Vim |packages| to install the Nvim-R package (either the zip or the tar.gz file) released at https://github.com/jalvesaq/Nvim-R/releases.

Troubleshooting

Note: The <LocalLeader> is \ by default.

The plugin is a file-type plugin. It will be active only if you are editing a .R, .Rnw, .Rd, .Rmd, .Rrst or .qmd file. The key bindings will not be active while editing either unnamed files or files with name extensions other than the mentioned above: However, see: https://github.com/jalvesaq/Nvim-R/wiki/Enable-Nvim-R-for-any-file-type

If the plugin is active, pressing <LocalLeader>rf should start R.

Did you see warning messages but they disappeared before you have had time to read them? Type the command :messages in Normal mode to see them again.

Run the command :RDebugInfo which will show information useful to fix some common issues.

To see messages received by nvimcom, put in your ~/.Rprofile:

options(nvimcom.verbose = 5)

To see messages received by Vim, uncomment the first line of the function ROnJobStdout() at R/nvimrcom.vim and delete the string "DEBUG:". It will become:

call writefile(a:data, "/dev/shm/nvimrserver_stdout", "a")

Then, in another terminal or in another Tmux pane, you would have to use tail to follow the output:

tail -f /dev/shm/nvimrserver_stdout

If R does not start with the <LocalLeader>rf command and you get an error message instead, you may want to set the path to the R executable (see R_path).

nvimcom-not-loaded

If you see the following message in the R console:

During startup - Warning messages:
1: In library(package, lib.loc = lib.loc, character.only = TRUE,
              logical.return = TRUE, : there is no package called ‘nvimcom’
2: package ‘nvimcom’ in options("defaultPackages") was not found

Try quitting both R and Vim and starting them again.

If you still see the message "The package nvimcom wasn't loaded yet" after starting R, then Nvim-R could not induce R to load nvimcom. Nvim-R sets the environment variable R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES before starting R. If the variable already exists, the string ,nvimcom is appended to it.

However, if you set the option defaultPackages in your .Rprofile or in a .Rprofile in the current directory, the environment variable will be overridden. Thus, if you have to set the option defaultPackages, you should include "nvimcom" among the packages to be loaded. You might want to include "nvimcom" only if R was started by Nvim-R, as in the example below:

if(Sys.getenv("NVIMR_TMPDIR") == ""){
    options(defaultPackages = c("utils", "grDevices", "graphics", "stats", "methods"))
} else {
    options(defaultPackages = c("utils", "grDevices", "graphics", "stats", "methods", "nvimcom"))
}

Finally, run the command :RDebugInfo after <LocalLeader>rf and check the path where nvimcom was installed.

On Windows, nvimcom compilation will fail if your .Rprofile outputs anything during R Startup. It will also fail with a message about --slave not being a gcc option if either make.exe or gcc.exe from RTools are not the first ones found in your systems' PATH (see R_path and Rtools-path).

Optional steps

The plugin should work without the need of any configuration right after installation, but if you do not like how the plugin works, you could look at the section Nvim-R-options to see if there is an option that could make you happier.

You can also install additional plugins to get more useful functionality to edit R code. Please, access Nvim-R's wiki: https://github.com/jalvesaq/Nvim-R/wiki

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