Hello everyone. I searched for similar questions and I found that it was asked before at least by two people here and here, unfortunately with no replies. Here's another attempt.
Is there a way to use the keyboard shortcuts and dialogues of RStudio's Visual mode (for example, Ctrl-Shift-F8 for citations) in Source mode and just get the proper tags in your text without having to go into Visual mode and have your document mangled by Pandoc?
No, currently there is no way to get at features such as Citations without using Visual Editor. There's an issue specifically requesting that (Citations) here: Request: also provide the insert-citation tool in source mode (it is só useful!) · Issue #7876 · rstudio/rstudio · GitHub
Thank you @GaryR . I second that motion. Citations is certainly what I had in mind. That is so useful and it's a shame that you have to parse through Pandoc for just one sec and things "move" afterwards. But then there's also the smaller things like bold and italics like it works in this very forum edit box with strong (ctrl+b) and emphasis (ctrl+i) .