Allow easy file management via command line, for Rstudio and Jupyter environment

Terra allows us to run Rstudio and Jupyter notebooks. It seems to me that the two GUI interfaces are mutually exclusive.

  1. If I starts a VM with Rstudio, I don’t have the terminal tab on the menu on the right side. The way I can access the VM file system is to use terminal tab inside the Rstudio. The only problem with using Rstudio terminal inside Terra is, I CANNOT use keystroke to copy & paste. The only way to move the files across different gs location, seem to be via R package AnVILGCP, or MANUALLY TYPE the “gs://…/”. By the way, AnVILGCP does not come as one of the default package for Rstudio environment.

  2. If I starts a Jupyter notebooks, I have the terminal tab on the menu on the right side. In the terminal tab, I can use keystroke Ctr+X, Ctr+V, and etc… But Jupyter environment does not allow me to open multiple files on the current VM. The terminal window only allow view one file at a time.

Can we have the terminal tab on for the Rstudio environment?
Can we allow the Jupyter Notebook to have the open file option on the notebook manu bar?

After participated in the AnVIL demo session, I was taught a new trick to run bash script in RStudio. I can open a text editor for shell script, and submit the script to terminal.

Also I was told that I can copy and paste in the R terminal tab. The key point is, for different users, in some computer/browser operation system, we may need to use mouse right click to bring up the pop-up menu to facilitate the paste. For me, I cannot use keystroke in the terminal tab, but I can use the pop-up option, like shown in the picture. BTW, I can use keystroke if I am in the file editor, in the console without any issue.

Shout out to AnVIL support team to answer my questions.

I have to say, without an editor in Jupyter notebook to allow user to edit their text file, it is a little inconvenient.

2 Likes