RStudio main window title

RStudio IDE
1

Hi,

I am working on the same project on multiple RStudio windows/sessions, and would really like to customize (set) the main window title to reflect what I work on in each particular window/session. I am working on MacOS.
I looked up the web and none of the solutions mentioned seems to work on Mac (common proposed solution is studioapi::setWindowTitle but this method doesn't exist on MacOS).

Does anyone know if there is any way to control the title? This is especially important when switching between application (Cmd+Tab) and identifying the right R session to switch to.

Thanks!

2

RStudio Desktop on macOS unfortunately doesn’t support customizing the window title.

If you’re working with multiple RStudio windows in the same desktop, one workaround is to place them on different Mission Control desktops (Spaces) to make switching a bit easier.

There’s also some discussion around renaming Spaces here (though macOS doesn’t natively support it):

It’s not a perfect solution sorry, but it may help a bit with managing multiple sessions.

3

Thanks @reinas_data.studio, and sorry for the late response.

I was using the multi pace solution for a while. My main problem is not really the window title when using studio, but rather the identical name and symbol of all Rstudios instances when doing app switch (cmd+tab). I want to be able to quickly switch between the instances and when switching, all instances look and named the same , and they are ordered by last used, which in this case it’s making it even harder to pick the right instance to switch to.

I was thinking of two non ideal hacks that may or may not work:

  1. Duplicate the app in Apps folder, giving different names or even different icon for each (an App is really a folder, and you can change those if you get into this directory). Even if it works, it is obviously a waste of space. I assume though that Rstudio can handle concurrent access to shred resources between the 3 apps, as it does allow multiple sessions to run in parallel on the same directory. Hopefully it works even of the invoked app is a copy of the other (think of keeping two version of the app, names differently, and invoking one with the older version and one with the newer version at the same time. I believe it is supported )
  2. A better solution would be to create different shell apps (named differently) that invoke Rstidio. I was thinking of Automator or shortcuts. Definitely more efficient , I’m not sure whether the app switch bar will show the icon and name of the shell app rather than the Rstudio one.

If you experimented with any of those, I’ll be happy to hear about it. Otherwise I may try it and post an answer to my own post.

Thanks.