With R session watcher enabled, multiple types of viewers are supported to display tabular data, graphics, htmlwidgets and shiny apps.

View() will open a tab to view the object.

And, Apache Arrow Table will be converted to a data.frame and then displayed in the table viewer.

The table viewer supports sorting and searching.

The list viewer supports collapsing nodes.

Graphics could be displayed in native X11/XQuartz window, or as a PNG file in VS Code window, or in a plot viewer based on httpgd device. For more details, go to https://github.com/REditorSupport/vscode-R/wiki/Plot-viewer.

In R, an htmlwidget is written in HTML and can be presented in a web browser. For example, the following image demonstrates an interactive graphics created by plotly:

Interactive shiny apps can be displayed in VS Code. The following is an example created by

shiny::runExample("01_hello")

For security reasons, the VS Code WebView has security limitations on its capability of accessing external resources over a network. For more details, visit WebView API.

If you encounter a problem loading a webpage in a browser viewer, you may try viewing the web page in an external web browser.

The web pages in R documentation can be viewed in the help viewer. Syntax highlighting and link navigation are supported.

Help viewer could be revealed via ?symbol in R terminal, or from the Help pages viewer in the sidebar, or via command R: Open help for selection in either command palette or context menu in the editor.