NEWS-1.3.md

v1.3 - Release Notes

Accessibility

• Dramatically improved accessibility for sight-impaired users, including:
  • Keyboard focus management and visibility upgrades
  • Improved keyboard navigation
  • Compatibility with popular screen readers
  • Compliant contrast ratios and other accessibility improvements
  • User preference for disabling user-interface animations such as when zooming panes

Spell Check

• Real-time spell-checking engine for checking while editing
• Customizable dictionaries and word ignore lists preloaded with common R terms
• Inline correction suggestions

Preferences and Configuration

• All user preferences and settings can now be set using a plain JSON file
• All user preferences can now have global defaults set by a system administrator
• New diagnostics commands for editing the prefs file, resetting state, and viewing pref system data
• Editor themes, snippets, file templates, and keybindings are now portable and can be installed by admins
• The content of new file templates (New R Script, New R Markdown, etc.) can now be controlled by users or administrators

renv

• New projects can be initialized with renv, giving them an isolated project environment

Server Security

• New auth-timeout-minutes option signs users out after a defined period of inactivity (Pro #667)
• CSRF hardening improvements including optional validation of the HTTP Origin header (Pro #1214)
• Add option auth-cookies-force-secure to always mark auth cookies as secure when SSL is terminated upstream (Pro #995)
• Set HTTP header X-Content-Type-Options to discourage MIME type sniffing (Pro #1219)
• Authentication cookies are now revoked after signout (Pro #606)
• File-serving resource endpoints can now be made more restrictive; added new restrict-directory-view and directory-view-whitelist options (Pro #607)
• RStudio Server now uses 2048 bit RSA keys, for secure communication of encrypted credentials between server / session and client

iPad OS 13

• Improved keyboard and touch support for iPadOS 13.1
• Support Ctrl+[ as Esc key on iPadOS 13.1 keyboards lacking physical Esc key (#4663)
• Add ability to resize panes using keyboard arrow keys via View / Panes / Adjust Splitter

Terminal Improvements

• User preference to configure initial working directory of new terminals (#1557)
• Command to open a new terminal at location of current editor file
• Command to insert the full path and filename of current editor file into terminal
• Command in File pane to open a new terminal at File pane's current location
• Command in to change terminal to current RStudio working directory (#2363)
• PowerShell Core option in terminal (Windows-only)
• Custom terminal shell option for Windows desktop (previously only on Mac, Linux, and server)
• Change shortcuts for Next/Previous terminal to avoid clash with common Windows shortcuts (#4892)
• Suppress macOS Catalina message about switching to zsh in Terminal pane (#6182)
• Add 'Close All Terminals' command to Terminal menu (#3564)
• Zsh option in terminal for Mac and Linux desktop, and RStudio Server (#5587)

Diagnostics and Recovery

• Add automated crash handling and reporting
• Show detailed logs and process output when R fails to start (#2097)
• Add "Safe Mode" for opening sessions without profile scripts or workspace restoration (#4338)

Tutorials

• Support for tutorials with the learnr package in a new Tutorials pane

Background Jobs

• Add support for running Shiny applications as background jobs (#5190)
• Install missing package dependencies in a background job (#5584)

Auto Save

• Changes automatically (and optionally) saved to disk after a few seconds or when editor loses focus (#5263)
• Option to disable real-time backup of unsaved changes to avoid conflicts with Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. (#3837)
• Option to adjust idle interval for backup or saving changes

Miscellaneous

• Add global replace with live preview and regular expression support (#2066)
• Enable large file uploads (over 4GB) in RStudio Server (#3299)
• Improved 'Comment / Uncomment' handling of empty lines around selection (#4163)
• Files with extension '.q' are no longer indexed or parsed as R files (#4696)
• Add support for an API command to return the list of R packages RStudio depends on (#2332)
• Upgrade internal JSON parsing engine for speed improvements (#1830)
• Improved ergonomics for history prefix navigation (#2771)
• Make columns resizable in the Environment pane (#4020)
• Add Word Count command (#4237)
• Keyboard shortcuts for main menu items on RStudio Server (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F for File menu)
• Show number of characters when entering version control commit messages (#5192)
• Update embedded Qt to 5.12.5 for Chromium update, stability and bugfixes (#5399)
• Add preference for changing font size on help pane (#3282)
• Warn when Xcode license has not been agreed to on macOS when command line tools required (#5481)
• Improved browser tab names (project name first, complete product name) (Pro #1172)
• The diagnostics system now understands referenced symbols in glue strings (#5270)
• Add preference for compiling .tex files with tinytex (#2788)
• Long menus and popups now scroll instead of overflowing (#1760, #1794, #2330)
• Sort package-installed R Markdown templates alphabetically (#4929)
• The 'Reopen with Encoding' command now saves unsaved changes before re-opening the document. (#5630)
• Autocomplete support for Plumber #* comment keywords (#2220)
• Automatically continue Plumber #* on successive lines (#2219)
• Comment / uncomment is now enabled for YAML documents (#3317)
• Reflow comment has been rebound to 'Ctrl + Shift + /' on macOS. (#2443)
• Allow fuzzy matches in help topic search (#3316)
• The diagnostics system better handles missing expressions (#5660)
• Keyboard shortcuts for debugging commands can be customized (#3539)
• Update Pandoc to 2.7.3 (#4512)
• Update SumatraPDF to version 3.1.2 (#3155)
• Allow previewing PDFs in fullscreen mode in Sumatra PDF (#4301)
• RStudio Server runtime files are stored in /var/run, or another configurable location, instead of /tmp (#4666)
• Errors encountered when attempting to find Rtools installations are handled more gracefully (#5720)
• Enable copying images to the clipboard from the Plots pane (#3142)
• Update minimum supported browser versions (#5593)
• Automatic refresh of the Git pane can now be enabled / disabled as required. (#4368)
• Target directory can be changed from within the 'Upload Files' dialog (RStudio Server)
• Zoom Left/Right Column commands for keyboard users (#5874)
• Increase maximum plot size for large, high-DPI displays (#4968; thanks to Jan Gleixner)
• Make maximum lines in R console configurable; was previously fixed at 1000 (#5919)
• Option to only show project name instead of full path in desktop window title (#1817)
• New rstudio --version command to return the version of RStudio Desktop (#3922)
• Scan R Markdown YAML header for R packages required to render document (#4779)
• Support use of F13 - F24 for custom keyboard shortcuts (full Mac keyboard has F13-F19, for example)
• Keyboard shortcuts for searching R help in Help pane, and next/previous help page (#5149)
• Keep keyboard focus in the console during debugging (#6039)
• Enable wrap-around for previous/next source tab by default (#6139)
• Provide full SHA in detail of Git commits (#6155)
• File monitor now ignores Packrat, renv library folders (#3267)
• Make global source control commands rebindable (#6503)

Bugfixes

• Fix issue where calling install.packages() without arguments would fail (#5154)
• Fix issue where C code in packages would incorrectly be diagnosed as C++ (#5418)
• Fix plot history when plot() called immediately after dev.off() (#3117)
• Fix debug stopping past breakpoint when source windows are open (#3683)
• Fix diagnostics error with multibyte characters in R Markdown documents on Windows (#1866)
• Fix stale processes when invoking child R processes with large command lines (#3414)
• Fix an issue where help tooltips could become corrupt when using prettycode (#5561)
• Fix an issue where signature tooltips were shown even when disabled by user preference (#5405)
• Fix an issue where Git did not work within projects whose paths contained multibyte characters (#2194)
• Fix an issue where RStudio would fail to preview self-contained bookdown books (#5371)
• Fix modal dialog boundaries extending out of the app window in certain cases (#1605)
• Fix issue where session restore could fail when using multiple user libraries
• Fix issue where library paths were not forwarded when building package documentation
• Restore ability to select and copy text in version control diffs (#4734)
• Fix incorrect column names when non-dataframes with a column named x were viewed (#3304)
• Fix inconsistent shading in R Markdown chunk backgrounds with folding (#2992)
• Fix list column display in columns past 50 with data viewer (#5851)
• Fix incorrect column type display when paging columns (#5479)
• Fix incorrect sorting in data viewer when paging columns (#4682)
• Fix carryover of light ANSI background colors (#6092)
• Fix issue where Shiny applications using reticulate on Windows could crash on run (#6140)
• Fix issue where pasting text into last chunk in document could occasionally cause hang (#6226)
• Fix blank Viewer Pane when displaying most HTML widgets with R 4.0.0 (#6737)

RStudio Professional

• Logging improvements; log destinations and levels are more configurable and can be changed in real time
• RStudio Desktop Pro can now function as a client for RStudio Server Pro
• New tools for viewing and managing server users when using named user licensing
• Floating licensing can now pass through an HTTPS proxy
• The Launcher service now starts and runs automatically when the system starts
• New Kubernetes Launcher plugin feature to modify the generated job/pod specs (#1353)
• When containers are created when running RStudio Launcher sessions, user home directories are propagated to the container instead of requiring the home directories to be mounted at /home. This is a potentially breaking change, and will requiring updating the /etc/rstudio/laucher-mounts file to mount the home directory to the correct location (#1369)
• New Kubernetes Launcher plugin feature to allow the specification of a requests limit to allow for oversubscription of Kubernetes resources (#1360)
• Slurm Launcher plugin will now generate jobs with much shorter names (#1595)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr Jonathan Godfrey (Massey University, New Zealand), and to JooYoung Seo (https://www.jooyoungseo.com/) for their valuable insights on improving screen reader support in RStudio 1.3.