R: Edit One or More Files

file.edit {utils} | R Documentation

## Edit One or More Files

### Description

Edit one or more files in a text editor.

### Usage

    file.edit(..., title = file, editor = getOption("editor"),
              fileEncoding = "")

### Arguments

`...` | one or more character vectors containing the names of the files to be displayed. These will be tilde-expanded: see `path.expand`.
`title` | the title to use in the editor; defaults to the filename.
`editor` | the text editor to be used, usually as a character string naming (or giving the path to) the text editor you want to use See ‘Details’.
`fileEncoding` | the encoding to assume for the file: the default is to assume the native encoding. See the ‘Encoding’ section of the help for `file`.

### Details

The behaviour of this function is very system-dependent. Currently files can be opened only one at a time on Unix; on Windows, the internal editor allows multiple files to be opened, but has a limit of 50 simultaneous edit windows.

The `title` argument is used for the window caption in Windows, and is currently ignored on other platforms.

Any error in re-encoding the files to the native encoding will cause the function to fail.

The default for `editor` is system-dependent. On Windows it defaults to `"internal"`, the script editor, and in the macOS GUI the document editor is used whatever the value of `editor`. On Unix the default is set from the environment variables EDITOR or VISUAL if either is set, otherwise `vi` is used.

`editor` can also be an R function, in which case it is called with the arguments `name`, `file`, and `title`. Note that such a function will need to independently implement all desired functionality.

On Windows, UTF-8-encoded paths not valid in the current locale can be used.

### See Also

`files`, `file.show`, `edit`, `fix`,

### Examples

    ## Not run:
    # open two R scripts for editing
    file.edit("script1.R", "script2.R")

    ## End(Not run)

[Package utils version 4.0.5 Index]