Add rmarkdown (or knitr) mode to shinyAce

[sjmgarnier]

I'm currently working on a rmarkdown editor with instant preview using shinyAce (code at swarm-lab/editR). It works great and it is very easy to set up. Thank you for this.

My problem is that if I use aceEditor in markdown mode, R code chunks don't get syntax highlighting or automated indentation like RStudio does for instance. Do you plan on creating a rmarkdown (or knitr) mode for shinyAce (or for Ace more generally)?

[trestletech]

You're quite welcome. And I really like your app! I may use that in the future when doing Rmd.

Unfortunately the Ace syntax highlighting for R is not Rmarkdown-aware. The "proper" implementation here is, of course, RStudio IDE. And they do use Ace and have all the syntax highlighters that you're looking for.

Unfortunately, due to the licensing discrepancies between the two projects (GPL3 for RStudio, MIT for shinyAce), we wouldn't be able to pull in their syntax highlighters, if I understand the legal stuff there. So until I (or a generous pull requester ;) ) were to rewrite the hundreds/thousands of lines that went into RStudio's rmarkdown syntax highlighting system, I don't foresee shinyAce being able to support this feature.

I'll leave it open as a request, but I don't see a reasonable approach forward at the moment, unfortunately.

[sjmgarnier]

No problem. After reading similar requests online I figured it was not a trivial thing to do.

As for the legal thing of integrating RStudio code in yours, this chart pretty much sums it up I think, unfortunately. Oh well...

[rubenarslan]

There's actually a pull request for mixed mode support including R, but it's 3 years old. Here's the relevant ace issue for those who're looking ajaxorg/ace#1792

[vnijs]

Would be great to have this feature. A PR would be great