Air

Note

Air is currently in alpha. Expect breaking changes both in the API and in formatting results. We also recommend that you use a version control system like git so you can easily see the changes that Air makes.

An R formatter and language server, written in Rust.

Installation

Air is usable both as a command line tool and as a language server inside your favorite code editors. If you'd like to use Air within a code editor, we recommend reading our editors guide. If you'd just like to use Air from the command line, you can install Air using our standalone installers.

On macOS and Linux:

curl -LsSf https://github.com/posit-dev/air/releases/latest/download/air-installer.sh | sh

On Windows:

powershell -c "irm https://github.com/posit-dev/air/releases/latest/download/air-installer.ps1 | iex"

For a specific version:

curl -LsSf https://github.com/posit-dev/air/releases/download/0.1.1/air-installer.sh | sh
powershell -c "irm https://github.com/posit-dev/air/releases/download/0.1.1/air-installer.ps1 | iex"

The installer scripts will automatically add Air to your PATH. The very first time you install Air, you'll need to restart your shell for the PATH modifications to be applied.

Acknowledgements and inspiration

First and foremost, Air would not exist without the preexisting work and dedication poured into styler. Created by Lorenz Walthert and Kirill Müller, styler proved that the R community does care about how their code is formatted, and had been the primary implementation of the tidyverse style guide for many years.

Additionally, Air draws inspiration from many non-R sources including rust-analyzer, prettier, biome, and ruff. These are all excellent tools that provide either formatters, language servers, or both, all of which have influenced design decisions in Air, produced libraries on which we depend, or wrote code that we included in the project.

We are particularly thankful to biome, as Air is built on top of their language agnostic tooling for both building a rowan syntax tree and implementing a formatter. Biome is an open source project maintained by community members, please consider sponsoring them.