Rope

Rope is a REPL for the R programming language. It has support for timing, output history, object inspection and inline graphics. Rope also contains terminal-aware data frame rendering and a debugger front end.

REPLs are great tools for testing code interactively, benchmarking, and debugging. My goal with Rope was to have an R-REPL with no extra dependencies or runtimes. That means it should run on a vanilla R install with the features expected from a modern REPL: tab completion, syntax colouring, multi-line editing, history search, etc.

Getting started

Rope needs R built with a shared libR (R CMD config --ldflags should list -lR) and a C11 compiler. Everything else is vendored.

make          # builds ./rope
./rope

Arguments after rope are passed through to R. make check runs the tests.

Windows

Rope is developed on Linux and uses POSIX terminal and process APIs, so it does not build natively on Windows. Running it under WSL should work in principle, but that has not been tested.

Bug reports

Please open an issue at https://github.com/vlshields/rope/issues. It helps to include:

• the output of R --version and your OS and terminal
• the exact input that triggers the problem
• what you expected and what happened instead

Known issues

• %time around code that stops in browser() (or in a function under debug()) includes the time spent paused, and the browser command that ends the pause (such as c) is replayed at the top-level prompt.