1  Keyboard shortcuts and navigation

An under-appreciated but powerful aspect of your work as a data science is being adept with your keyboard. This includes knowing useful keyboard shortcuts and being able to do stuff with your cursor without touching your mouse.

Why am I asking you to learn these? Two reasons!

• Main and most important reason! I sincerely believe that you will feel super cool when you use them.
• In terms of utility: Being able to use keyboard shortcuts and mouseless navigation saves a lot of time. This article estimates that shortcuts could save 64 hours per year. (Note: I don’t necessarily espouse the article’s view on translating that saved time to more productivity. I just want you to be able to save time not doing things that take more time than they need to–like using your mouse to move your cursor.)

1.1 Navigating your cursor with the keyboard

Instead of pointing and clicking where you want your mouse to go, you can use keyboard shortcuts.

1.1.1 Navigating around words and letters

“Words” refer to a string of characters buffered before and after by a space (and sometimes other separating characters like a dash.)

Action	Windows	Mac
Move cursor to the beginning/end of a word	Ctrl Left/Right	Option Left/Right
Delete previous word	Ctrl Backspace	Option Delete
Delete next word	Ctrl Delete	Option Fn Delete
Highlight previous/next word	Ctrl Shift Left/Right	Option Shift Left/Right
Highlight previous/next letter	Shift Left/Right	Shift Left/Right

Sometimes it is actually faster to use your mouse. (e.g., If you want to move your cursor to the middle of a line with many words, using a keyboard shortcut would require holding Ctrl/Option+Left or Right for a few seconds, which is probably slower than using your mouse.)

1.1.2 Navigating around lines

Action	Windows	Mac
Move cursor to the beginning/end of a line	Alt Left/Right	Command Left/Right
Delete from cursor to beginning of line	Alt Backspace	Command Delete
Delete from cursor to end of line	Alt Delete	Command Fn Delete
Select from cursor to beginning/end of line	Alt Shift Left/Right	Command Shift Left/Right
Select from cursor to same position on previous/next line	Shift Up/Down	Shift Up/Down

1.1.3 General themes

• Ctrl (Windows) and Option (Mac) allow word navigation
• Alt (Windows) and Command (Mac) allow line navigation

Combine the above ideas with:

• Shift: to highlight words (useful for copying and pasting)
• Backspace and Delete: to delete

1.2 RStudio keyboard shortcuts

To view all of RStudio’s keyboard shortcuts, navigate to:

• Help > Keyboard Shortcuts Help

You can also customize these shortcuts:

• Tools > Modify Keyboard Shortcuts…

Below are (IMO) the most useful RStudio keyboard shortcuts.

1.2.1 Tab completion

Type part of a function or object name (in the Editor or Console) and then hit Tab. A menu of autocomplete options will popup. Select your choice with arrow keys and hit Tab or Enter. (e.g., Type ggp and hit Tab.) Tab completion also works for function arguments.

1.2.2 Working in source files

Action	Windows	Mac
Insert code chunk	Ctrl Alt I	Option Command I
Insert pipe operator (%>%)	Ctrl Shift M	Command Shift M
Insert assignment operator (<-)	Alt -	Option -
Run current code chunk	Ctrl Shift Enter	Command Shift Return
Run current line/currently selected lines	Ctrl Enter	Command Return
(Un)comment current line/currently selected lines	Ctrl Shift C	Command Shift C

Notes:

• On my Mac, I like to change the “Insert assignment operator” shortcut to Command , (This overrides the shortcut for pulling up RStudio’s options, but I don’t look at those options often anyway.)
• When running a single line of code, your cursor can be anywhere on the line–it doesn’t need to be all the way at the beginning or end.
• When running code that is selected across multiple lines, exactly what is selected is run. If you want to run part of a line, select just that part. If you want to run multiple whole lines, select all those lines in their entirety.
• When commenting/uncommenting lines, you don’t need to have the whole line fully selected. Having just part of a line selected suffices.

1.2.3 Working in the Console

While you may be used to writing all of your code in code chunks within a document, it is often useful to run code interactively in the Console as “scratch work.” You’ll often find that when testing out code, trying it out in the Console keeps your code document clean.

Action	Windows	Mac
Move cursor to the Console	Ctrl 2	Ctrl 2
Cycle through previous commands	Up/Down	Up/Down
Show pop up of command history	Ctrl Up	Command Up
Interrupt currently executing command	Esc	Esc

You can pull up the documentation (help page) for a function by entering ?function_name in the Console.