Alternative R Frontend — a modern R console written in Rust
arf is a modern, cross-platform R console written in Rust. It provides a rich interactive experience with fuzzy help search, intelligent history navigation, and syntax highlighting—all with fast startup times.
Tab completion of package names and the :help browser (search and rendering) are now noticeably faster, especially with many installed packages, since they read R's on-disk package metadata directly instead of evaluating R code for most lookups (#257).
The :help browser now renders the Arguments section as a list instead of a table, so argument descriptions containing bullet lists or multiple paragraphs are shown in full rather than squashed onto one line.
Fixed
arf ipc send input that produced no R output (e.g. assignments) could vanish from the REPL instead of being echoed, while inputs that produced output were shown reliably (#265).
Install arf-console 0.4.4
Install prebuilt binaries via shell script
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/eitsupi/arf/releases/download/v0.4.4/arf-console-installer.sh | sh
Install prebuilt binaries via powershell script
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/eitsupi/arf/releases/download/v0.4.4/arf-console-installer.ps1 | iex"
Download arf-console 0.4.4
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────┬─────────────
File │Platform │Checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.xz │Apple Silicon macOS│checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.xz │Intel macOS │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-pc-windows-msvc.zip │ARM64 Windows │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip │x64 Windows │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz │ARM64 Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz │x64 Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-aarch64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.xz │ARM64 MUSL Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼─────────────
arf-console-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.xz │x64 MUSL Linux │checksum
──────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────┴─────────────