1. Using rUM on Posit.Cloud or with Positron

Introduction

rUM has many tools to help you write papers and reports efficiently. They will work if you are not working in the RStudio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on a Mac or Windows but some of the menu options that we show in the other vignettes will not be available. So you will need to type a line or two into the R console instead of clicking on menu options.

Here we explain how to use rUM on Posit.Cloud (or other IDEs like Positron).

rUM on Posit.Cloud

The other vignettes for rUM show you that it integrates with the RStudio IDE menus. Unfortunately, on Posit.Cloud the New Project button does not know about rUM. So you will need to type a command to create a new rUM based project. Because Posit.Cloud treats each project as its own walled-off environment, you need to tell rUM to only work in the current folder/directory. Most of rUM’s functions will do that automatically. However, rUM’s primary function make_project() needs you to do this by specifying the location for the project to be "./" (that is UNIX code shorthand that means “in this folder/directory”). Because Posit.Cloud projects have a project.Rproj file, you will also need to add the overwrite = TRUE option to tell rUM to overwrite the default Posit.Cloud project file. Here is an example:

rUM::make_project("./", overwrite = TRUE)

If you want to make a new project that will be a package with a vignette written with Quarto, use code like this:

rUM::make_project('./', 'Q', example = F, vignette = T, overwrite = TRUE) 

After typing that in the console and pushing return/enter on your keyboard, you will need to confirm that you really want to make a new project. Choose the option that means Yes when RStudio asks you to confirm that you want to overwrite the existing project and namespace files. Say Yes when it asks you if you want to quit and Switch Projects.

Session

If you are new to R, ignore this.

sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.4.3 (2025-02-28)
#> Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
#> Running under: macOS Sequoia 15.3.1
#> 
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.4-arm64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib 
#> LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.4-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
#> 
#> locale:
#> [1] C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
#> 
#> time zone: America/New_York
#> tzcode source: internal
#> 
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
#> 
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#>  [1] digest_0.6.37     R6_2.6.1          fastmap_1.2.0     xfun_0.51        
#>  [5] cachem_1.1.0      knitr_1.50        htmltools_0.5.8.1 rmarkdown_2.29   
#>  [9] lifecycle_1.0.4   cli_3.6.4         sass_0.4.9        jquerylib_0.1.4  
#> [13] compiler_4.4.3    rstudioapi_0.17.1 tools_4.4.3       evaluate_1.0.3   
#> [17] bslib_0.9.0       yaml_2.3.10       rlang_1.1.5       jsonlite_1.9.1