Rstudio: Feature: distraction-free writing mode

[richardohrvall]

Hi!

I really enjoy working in RStudio and with Rmarkdown it is possible to write scientific articles without leaving RStudio. However, in my opinion, the source pane is not ideal for writing longer texts. I could of course switch to another markdown editor that have fullscreen distraction-free writing mode and then switch back for data analyses, but it would be nice to stay inside RStudio.

I know I can zoom in the source pane, but that's not distraction-free (you still see the menus and also the task bar in the operating system). And also, the font is a bit small then so I have to change that (and then back when I zoom out). It would be great if I could just press some key to get the source pane in fullscreen, distraction-free writing mode with a suitable font size. Something like Typora or WriteMonkey or any similar product.

[jmcphers]

Relevant tweet:

For writing documents in Rmarkdown, @rstudio really needs some kind of focus mode and a better editor pane (e.g. soft wrap at X chars, control over line height, etc.)

https://twitter.com/chrisharms/status/1133633352962072576

[ulyngs]

This is very high on my wish list - I write all my academic papers in R Markdown and encourage others to do so as well, but the lack of a writing-friendly view of R Markdown documents in RStudio is a major stumbling block.

I usually resort to do writing of prose in Typora, but this has the major drawback of not being able to run code chunks and therefore I'm not being able to see plots, images included with knitr, etc. while I'm writing.

[tafakkur]

+1 for this.
I usually write in VSCode then come back to RStudio for the knitting and other things.
A distraction-free mode + Visual Editor mode (RStudio preview 1.4), would be superb.