Automatically "sourcing" function on change

Question

While I am writing .R functions I constantly need to manually write source("funcname.r") to get the changes reflected in the workspace. I am sure it must be possible to do this automatically. So what I would like would be just to make changes in my function, save the function and be able to use the new function in R workspace without manually "sourcing" this function. How can I do that?

UPDATE: I know about selecting appropriate lines of code and pressing CTRL+R in R Editor (RGui) or using Notepad++ and executing the lines into R. But this approach has a disadvantage of making my workspace console "muddled". I would like to stop this practice if at all possible.

Answer 1

You can use R studio which has a source on save option.

Answer 2

If you are prepared to package your functions into a package, you may enjoy exploring Hadley's devtools package. This provides a suite of tools to write, test and document packages.

https://github.com/hadley/devtools

This approach offer many advantages, but mainly reloading the package with a minimum of retyping.

You will still have to type load_all("yourpackage") but I find this small amount of typing is small beer compared to the advantages of devtools.

For additional information, including how to setup devtools, have a look at https://github.com/hadley/devtools/wiki/development