How to style your Quarto/R Markdown code chunks in RStudio

In RStudio when you’re writing a Quarto (.qmd) or R Markdown (.Rmd) document, the code chunks themselves are not automatically “tidyverse-styled.” What you might want is to have the code inside the chunks formatted according to the tidyverse style guide.

Here’s how you can set that up:

1. Set up the styler package

1.1. Install the styler package

install.packages("styler")

1.2. Style code chunks in your document

In RStudio, you can style all code chunks in your .qmd/.Rmd file by running

styler::style_file("your_file.Rmd")

or style only the highlighted lines of code by running

styler:::style_selection()

1.3. Example

Before styling:

library(dplyr)
df%>%group_by(species)%>%summarise(avg=mean(sepal_length))

After styling:

library(dplyr)

df %>%
  group_by(species) %>%
  summarise(avg = mean(sepal_length))

2. Set up styler shortcut in RStudio (Optional)

2.1. Open Keyboard Shortcut editor in RStudio

In RStudio, go to Tools -> Modify Keyboard Shortcuts…. A searchable dialog should appear.

2.2. Find the styler actions

Search for "style" in the search bar. You should see actions like Style active file, Style selection, etc.

2.3. Bind shortcuts to actions

Click the Shortcut column in the corresponding row and press the key combination you want to use (e.g., Alt/Option + Shift + F for matching VS Code). Make sure the shortcut is not already in use.

LLM Usage Disclosure

Model	Organization	Date
GPT-5	OpenAI	September 2025

This content was created with assistance from the above-mentioned large language model(s). All information has been reviewed and verified by the author.