I’m working on an important coursework project in R Studio and have encountered a critical issue that I’m unable to resolve. Earlier today, R Studio suddenly froze, and now the application only displays a grey screen. The window is completely frozen, I can’t close it, reopen it, or interact with it in any way.
I’m especially worried that my progress might have been lost, as I cannot open another file, close this current window, or access or export my code to check if anything has been saved. Has anyone experienced this issue before, or does anyone have advice on how to recover code from a frozen R Studio session?
You did not indicate what operating system you are using (Windows?), but every OS has a method for killing programs that cannot be closed the normal way. Typically it involves a command run from a command prompt/terminal. So you can look that up and use it to kill the RStudio window, then try to start RStudio again (and, if it hangs, kill it the same way).
If RStudio persists in hanging after restarts, you might try resetting its state.
I am using a Surface laptop with Windows as the operating system. I did try using Task Manager to kill the RStudio process and restarted RStudio multiple times, but unfortunately, the issue persists. The program continues to freeze with a grey screen when I try to reopen it, and I still cannot access my code.
Could you please clarify what you mean by “resetting RStudio’s state”? I’ve seen some references to deleting certain configuration files, but I’m hesitant to try anything that might delete or corrupt my project files. If there’s a safe way to do this, I would really appreciate detailed instructions.
The link I provided has detailed instructions based on operating system. They recommend that you rename or move the relevant RStudio files rather than delete them. That way, you don't lose the information. Note that the files in question are not code, RMarkdown notebooks or other things that you would have written. As far as I know, the process is pretty safe. I think the backups are mainly to preserve personal preferences and RStudio settings you may have changed (which should be easy enough to redo even without the backups). If clearing the state does not solve your problem, you can just restore the backed up files to their original names and locations and be back where you started.