Working with Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a free and powerful IDE that can facilite first-class code editing, shell access, document viewing and more on the cluster. It has very broad adoption in the community and many excellent extensions. It is the recommended way to work on the cluster day-to-day.

Installation

To get going, download and install Visual Studio Code on your client machine from the link above. You will then need to install the following extensions:

• Remote SSH

• Python for python code sytax highlight and more.

• R for R code syntax highlighting and more.

• vscode-pdf for viewing PDFs

• image preview for viewing images

• Jupyter for jupyter notebooks

• Awesome Emacs Keymap if you are used to emacs keybindings.

Running R scripts

To evaluate code in rscripts interactively, you will need to have the following in your settings.json file:

// Use active terminal for all commands, rather than creating a new R terminal
"r.alwaysUseActiveTerminal": true,

// Use bracketed paste mode
"r.bracketedPaste": true,

// Enable R session watcher
"r.sessionWatcher": true,

// This requires the R httpgd package to be installed
"r.plot.useHttpgd": true,

// Optionally disablye R conding linting:
"r.lintr.enabled": false,

And the following lines in your .Rprofile:

# Enable vscode hooks
if (interactive() && Sys.getenv("RSTUDIO") == "") {
source(file.path(Sys.getenv(if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") "USERPROFILE" else "HOME"), ".vscode-R", "init.R"))
}

Syncing settings between machines

Syncing of vscode settings and extensions between machines can be performed easily by linking vscode to your github account as described here.