On the left “activity” navigation bar in Visual Studio Code, click the icon with the four squares to search for extensions. Install it like any other software package. VS Code is free and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Step one, obviously, is downloading Visual Studio Code, which you can find on the Visual Studio Code website.

So, VS Code is modular, and most users have to install extensions in order to optimize VS Code for their specific use cases.įor R users, that means installing a couple of extensions and tweaking a few settings. Offering all that capability by default out of the box would make for a pretty bloated piece of software. That’s because VSCode has the capacity to support hundreds of programming languages, considerably more than RStudio. Unfortunately, setting up Visual Studio Code to work with R isn’t quite as easy as installing RStudio. David Smith, cloud advocate at Microsoft, tweeted a brief demo showing that the GitHub Copilot beta can even suggest tidyverse code as well as base R.

It isn’t optimized for R, but it still will recommend R code. GitHub Copilot uses AI to suggest lines of code as you’re working.

Visual studio code github setup