The Art of R Programming

Startup and Shutdown

Like that of many sophisticated software applications, R’s behavior can be customized using startup files. In addition, R can save all or part of a session, such as a record of what you did, to an output file. If there are R commands that you would like to execute at the beginning of every R session, you can place them in a file called .Rprofile located either in your home directory or in the directory from which you are running R. The latter directory is searched for this file first, which allows you to have custom profiles for particular projects.

For example, to set the text editor that R invokes if you call edit(), you can use a line in .Rprofile like this (if you’re on a Linux system):

options(editor="/usr/bin/vim")