Preface: Sorry Windows users, you’re out of luck on this one!

I figured out a quick tip over the weekend to help me launch RStudio directly from the command line for Mac and Linux.

Simply add this line of code to your .bash_profile and restart it and you’ll be all set:

alias rstudio='open -a Rstudio *.Rproj'

You can edit your bash_profile in your editor of choice, the most simple being nano. The command to do that is: nano ~/.bash_profile.

If the folder you’re in has a .Rproj file, simply type rstudio into the terminal and it will open the project in RStudio. I find myself doing this a lot when I clone other people’s analysis to my local drive and want to take a look at what they’re doing.

If you work in terminal or with the command line a lot, you can set up all types of helpful aliases to be more efficient. I’m not an expert, but I have a few good aliases that I think are helpful.

Happy analyzing!