7 Keyboard Shortcuts

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically. — Imaged sources from https://xkcd.com/2150/

Keyboard shortcuts tend to make our lives easier. Some that you might already be familiar with in day to day life are: quickly saving (Cmd + S or Ctrl + S), or Undo (Cmd + Z or Ctrl + Z).

There are many keyboard shortcuts you can access in R, this section provides a brief tour of them, and why you might want to use them.

7.1 Overview

Teaching 5 minutes
Exercises 5 minutes

7.2 Questions

What sort of keyboard shortcuts should I care about?

7.3 Objectives

7.4 Table of Common Shortcuts

Below is a small table of tasks you can perform with keyboard shortcuts

Action	Windows/Linux	Mac
Command Palette	Ctrl + Shift + P	Cmd + Shift + P
Render document	Ctrl + Shift + K	Cmd + Shift + K
Insert Chunk	Ctrl + Alt + I	Cmd + Option + I
Run current line or selection	Ctrl + Enter	Cmd + Return
Run Current Chunk	Ctrl + Alt + C	Cmd + Option + C
Show Keyboard Shortcut Reference	Alt+Shift+K	Option+Shift+K
Create multiple cursors	Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down	option + control + Up/Down
Delete the current line	Ctrl + D	Cmd + D
Un/Comment out a line	Ctrl + Shift + C	Cmd + Shift + C
Reformat Section	Ctrl + Shift + A	Cmd + Shift + A
Move lines up/down	Alt + Up/Down	Option + Up/Down
Copy lines up/down	Shift + Alt + Up/Down	Cmd + Option + Up/Down
Jump to Word	Ctrl + Left/Right	Option + Left or Right
Select to Word	Ctrl + Shift + Left/Right	Option + Shift + Left or Right
Jump to Line Start/End	Alt + Left/Right	Cmd + Left or Right
Select to Line Start/End	Shift + Alt + Left/Right	Shift + Cmd + Left or Right

7.5 Further Reading

The Rstudio Cheat Sheet has an index of shortcuts.
This help file has a guide to customising keyboard shortcuts.
The shrtcts R package for creating new shortcuts.
My course R Best Practices goes further into this, covering typing speed, working closer to the speed of thought, and a longer list of shortcuts worth learning.

Your Turn

In your awesome quarto document
- Practice using the Keyboard Shortcut Reference and find the keyboard shortcut for inserting a pipe character ( %>% or |>)
- Find the keyboard shortcut for inserting assignment (<-)
- Read the “Editing (console and source)” shortcuts
- Spend 5 minutes practicing these commands. Really!
Ask Nick to demonstrate some of his favourite shortcut combos
- e.g., multiline cursor, yank lines, copy lines, go to file/function