Alternative R Frontend — a modern R console written in Rust
arf is a modern, cross-platform R console written in Rust. It provides a rich interactive experience with fuzzy help search, intelligent history navigation, and syntax highlighting—all with fast startup times.
The help browser (:help), tab completion, and object inspection no longer silently overwrite user variables in .GlobalEnv (e.g. variables named db or base were at risk) (#233).
Support R installations on RHEL and AlmaLinux by checking /usr/lib64/R/lib/libR.so and using lazy symbol resolution when loading libR (#232).
Fixed .Rprofile not being loaded after :restart! on macOS/Linux when R_PROFILE_USER is set to an empty string in the environment. The fix from #226 applied only to Windows; this extends the same behaviour to Unix where R handles profile loading internally (#234).
The help browser (:help) no longer leaks raw HTML tags from some Rd documentation, which made pages like pak::FAQ unreadable (#244).
On macOS/Linux, Ctrl+C (SIGINT) delivered during R evaluation could terminate the session instead of cancelling the running computation. Ctrl+C now interrupts the evaluation and returns to the prompt, as on Windows (#245).
Updated to tree-sitter-r 1.3.0 and adjusted the input validator so unclosed raw strings (e.g. r"(...) are still correctly detected as incomplete input rather than being sent to R prematurely (#247).
Install arf-console 0.4.3
Install prebuilt binaries via shell script
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/eitsupi/arf/releases/download/v0.4.3/arf-console-installer.sh | sh
Install prebuilt binaries via powershell script
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/eitsupi/arf/releases/download/v0.4.3/arf-console-installer.ps1 | iex"
Download arf-console 0.4.3
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────┬─────────────
File │Platform │Checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.xz │Apple Silicon macOS│checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.xz │Intel macOS │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-pc-windows-msvc.zip │ARM64 Windows │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip │x64 Windows │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz │ARM64 Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz │x64 Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.xz │ARM64 MUSL Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.xz │x64 MUSL Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────┴─────────────
