NEWS.md

v1.3 - Release Notes

Accessibility

• Dramatically improved accessibility for sight-impaired users, including:
  • Keyboard focus management and visibility upgrades
  • Improved keyboard navigation
  • Compatibility with popular screen readers
  • Compliant contrast ratios and other accessibility improvements
  • User preference for disabling user-interface animations such as when zooming panes

Spell Check

• Real-time spell-checking engine for checking while editing
• Customizable dictionaries and word ignore lists preloaded with common R terms
• Inline correction suggestions

Auto Save

• Changes automatically (and optionally) saved to disk after a few seconds or when editor loses focus (#5263)
• Option to disable real-time backup of unsaved changes to avoid conflicts with Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. (#3837)
• Option to adjust idle interval for backup or saving changes

Preferences and Configuration

• All user preferences and settings can now be set using a plain JSON file
• All user preferences can now have global defaults set by a system administrator
• New diagnostics commands for editing the prefs file, resetting state, and viewing pref system data
• Editor themes, snippets, file templates, and keybindings are now portable and can be installed by admins
• The content of new file templates (New R Script, New R Markdown, etc.) can now be controlled by users or administrators

renv

• New projects can be initialized with renv, giving them an isolated project environment

Server Security

• New auth-timeout-minutes option signs users out after a defined period of inactivity (Pro #667)
• CSRF hardening improvements including validation of the HTTP Origin header, on by default (Pro #1214)
• Add option auth-cookies-force-secure to always mark auth cookies as secure when SSL is terminated upstream (Pro #995)
• Set HTTP header X-Content-Type-Options to discourage MIME type sniffing (Pro #1219)
• Authentication cookies are now revoked after signout (Pro #606)
• File-serving resource endpoints are now more restrictive; added new directory-view-whitelist option (Pro #607)

Miscellaneous

• Show detailed logs and process output when R fails to start (#2097)
• Enable large file uploads (over 4GB) in RStudio Server (#3299)
• Improved 'Comment / Uncomment' handling of empty lines around selection (#4163)
• Files with extension '.q' are no longer indexed or parsed as R files (#4696)
• Add support for an API command to return the list of R packages RStudio depends on (#2332)
• Add automated crash handling and reporting
• Upgrade internal JSON parsing engine for speed improvements (#1830)
• Improved ergonomics for history prefix navigation (#2771)
• Make columns resizable in the Environment pane (#4020)
• Add Word Count command (#4237)
• Add "Safe Mode" for opening sessions without profile scripts or workspace restoration (#4338)
• PowerShell Core option in terminal (Windows-only)
• Custom terminal shell option for Windows desktop (previously only on Mac, Linux, and server)
• Keyboard shortcuts for main menu items on RStudio Server (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F for File menu)
• Show number of characters when entering version control commit messages (#5192)
• Update embedded Qt to 5.12.5 for Chromium update, stability and bugfixes (#5399)
• Add preference for changing font size on help pane (#3282)
• Improved keyboard and touch support for iPadOS 13.1
• Support Ctrl+[ as Esc key on iPadOS 13.1 keyboards lacking physical Esc key (#4663)
• Warn when Xcode license has not been agreed to on macOS when command line tools required (#5481)
• Improved browser tab names (project name first, complete product name) (Pro #1172)
• Add 'Close All Terminals' command to Terminal menu (#3564)
• The diagnostics system now understands referenced symbols in glue strings (#5270)
• Add preference for compiling .tex files with tinytex (#2788)
• Long menus and popups now scroll instead of overflowing (#1760, #1794, #2330)
• Sort package-installed R Markdown templates alphabetically (#4929)
• The 'Reopen with Encoding' command now saves unsaved changes before re-opening the document. (#5630)
• Autocomplete support for Plumber #* comment keywords (#2220)
• Automatically continue Plumber #* on successive lines (#2219)
• Comment / uncomment is now enabled for YAML documents (#3317)
• Reflow comment has been rebound to 'Ctrl + Shift + /' on macOS. (#2443)
• Allow fuzzy matches in help topic search (#3316)
• The diagnostics system better handles missing expressions (#5660)
• Keyboard shortcuts for debugging commands can be customized (#3539)
• Update SumatraPDF to version 3.1.2 (#3155)
• RStudio Server runtime files are stored in /var/run, or another configurable location, instead of /tmp (#4666)

Bugfixes

• Fix issue where calling install.packages() without arguments would fail (#5154)
• Fix issue where C code in packages would incorrectly be diagnosed as C++ (#5418)
• Fix plot history when plot() called immediately after dev.off() (#3117)
• Fix diagnostics error with multibyte characters in R Markdown documents on Windows (#1866)
• Fix stale processes when invoking child R processes with large command lines (#3414)
• Fix an issue where help tooltips could become corrupt when using prettycode (#5561)
• Fix an issue where signature tooltips were shown even when disabled by user preference (#5405)
• Fix an issue where Git did not work within projects whose paths contained multibyte characters (#2194)
• Fix an issue where RStudio would fail to preview self-contained bookdown books (#5371)
• Fix modal dialog boundaries extending out of the app window in certain cases (#1605)

RStudio Professional

• Logging improvements; log destinations and levels are more configurable and can be changed in real time
• RStudio Desktop Pro can now function as a client for RStudio Server Pro
• New tools for viewing and managing server users when using named user licensing