As I have been going through my courses – which use swirl() – I have been looking at how things work, comparing RStudio to RTVS. One of the things that was maddening for me was going through one of the courses in RTVS and having R files open in Notepad. Notepad?!? RStudio wasn’t doing this, so I was even more frustrated. I could also open R files with Visual Studio right from the file system, so the file association was already in place. This didn’t make sense. However… RTVS is an open source project, as is swirl(). So I spent tonight looking at code in GitHub.
Read on for the answer.