Render R Markdown from Vim (without opening R)

And there was a Vim plug-in for R Markdown indeed! In fact, a quick online search led me to three relevant/required Vim plug-ins: vim-rmarkdown, vim-pandoc, and vim-pandoc-syntax.

Following the plug-in instructions, as well as this helpful configuration tip, I was up and running with vim-rmarkdown plug-in in no time.

Figure 1: Rendering R Markdown Document from within Vim

In addition to the syntax highlighting (from vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc-syntax plug-ins), the vim-rmarkdown plug-in provides a function to render a source R Markdown document into output types of interest (e.g., html) from within the source R Markdown document in Vim. :RMarkdown command does the job, and it displays successful run message once the rendering is complete³.

Render R Markdown (and send email) from R

R Markdown documents can also be rendered from R too, by the usual rmarkdown::render() function. Generally one can review the rendered output by clicking the output file, but what if such clicking/reviewing is not an option? That’s a challenge I’m facing at work. Ok, maybe there’s a way to click/review a remote file, and if that’s the case, then nobody hasn’t told me how to just yet :)

I’m sure there’s a better way, but the workaround I came up with has two steps:

• Render R Markdown document (rmarkdown::render())
• Send an email to self with rendered output as attachment (sendmailR::sendmail()).

I didn’t know about the sendmailR package before, but the package lets you send emails from within R. I ended up writing a couple of wrapper functions (saved in my personal package) so that rendering and sending email can be done all at once by a single function call. Yes there are some drawbacks⁴, but I’ve been happy with the workflow so far.