What's New in R: October 26, 2026

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Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a project that puts your Positron shortcuts on Stream Deck buttons, a new book on automating repetitive data work with R, and (yes, really) an ASMR video on the basics of RStudio. Let's dive in!

Jan-Hendrik Weinert built Positron Deck, a community project that maps 192 Positron actions to the buttons of an Elgato Stream Deck. Things like running the next line of R, opening the data viewer, rendering a Quarto document, or switching your window layout become a single button press, and you can chain steps into custom workflows (save, then run tests, then commit, for example). It works through two pieces: a Positron extension and a Stream Deck plugin that sends hotkeys, with no network connection between them. The plugin is Windows-only for now, but if you've got a Stream Deck sitting on your desk, this is a really fun way to use it.

Tiger Tang has a new book out in the Chapman & Hall/CRC R Series all about using R to automate the repetitive parts of data work: generating reports, updating dashboards, monitoring metrics, sending alerts, and maintaining data pipelines. Rather than covering packages one at a time, the book focuses on building end-to-end workflows, from data ingestion through reporting, email and messaging, databases, scheduled jobs, and internal tools built with Shiny. It's aimed at analysts and data scientists with a working knowledge of R, no advanced programming experience required. Automation is one of the biggest wins R offers, so I'm glad to see a whole book dedicated to it (and the page has a promo code if you order from CRC Press).

I never thought I'd feature an ASMR video in What's New in R, but here we are. In this video from the Faint ASMR channel, the host walks through the basics of RStudio (importing data, loading a package, and knitting a file) in classic ASMR style, with headphones recommended. To be clear, this is not really a tutorial: the point is the soothing sounds, not the R. I'm honestly not sure who this is for, but it clearly appeals to someone, and it's a fun sign of just how far R has spread. Watch →

Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What's New in R? Hit reply and send them my way.

Cheers,

David

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