Since its first days as a company, JetBrains has relentlessly worked to make professional software development a more productive and enjoyable experience. This mission started 20 years ago with a single tool that helped refactor Java code and which later became a full-fledged IDE. Today JetBrains offers a dozen IDEs that replicate the enjoyable experience of developing with IntelliJ across multiple programming languages. In this post, we’d like to give you an update on one of those languages: the R language.

Support for the R language has been available for IntelliJ IDEA for quite a while. It was possible thanks to the help of Holger Brandl, who originally developed the plugin and then maintained it over many years. And relatively recently, JetBrains started to contribute to the plugin. JetBrains has helped re-implement some elements of the plugin and has significantly improved the plugin’s user experience by providing additional console and graphics integration, a working debugger, Rmarkdown support, and advanced coding assistance.

The plugin’s source code has remained open source, and the plugin itself is now compatible not only with IntelliJ IDEA but also with the entire family of the IntelliJ-platform, which means that it is now also available in PyCharm, DataGrip and other IDEs. Below you can find more details about the recent major improvements.

In case you don’t have time to read the entire post, here’s a quick glimpse of how it now feels to edit R code using the plugin:

As you can see, writing and reading R code using the plugin is now a rather pleasant experience.

The plugin now supports Extract and Inline refactorings. Notice that it is capable of automatically detecting code duplicates and replacing them during refactoring:

Parameter hints are another nice productivity improvement. These hints are special inlays in the editor that display the names of the function arguments which makes the code easier to read:

#new products #intellij platform #r